It increases the risk of prostate cancer

Jan 4, 2007 12:08 GMT  ·  By

If you think you are a smart boy that practices Daoism and impresses the girls with the ability of not ejaculating, wasting your precious energy, you'd better open your eyes: this will bring you a nice prostate cancer later.

Even if a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) does not link ejaculation frequency, a measure of sexual activity, with a higher risk for prostate cancer, a high ejaculation frequency may be linked to a decreased risk of prostate cancer.

Sexual activity has been hypothesized to play a role in the development of prostate cancer since long and a link between sexual activity and prostate cancer risk would have clinical and public health relevance.

Michael F. Leitzmann, M.D., of the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Md., and his team investigated the association between ejaculation frequency (by any meaning: sexual intercourse, nocturnal emission, and masturbation) and risk of prostate cancer.

The researchers used monitoring data from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study of 29,342 men in the U.S., aged 46 to 81 years, who gave information on history of ejaculation frequency on a self-administered questionnaire and responded to follow-up questionnaires every 2 years, from 1992 to 2000.

To assess ejaculation frequency, subjects were demanded to report the average number of ejaculations they had per month during the ages of 20 to 29 years, 40 to 49 years, and during the past year.

Among the study's subjects, there were 1,449 new cases of total prostate cancer, 953 organ-confined cases and 147 advanced cases of prostate cancer.

"In this prospective cohort study among predominantly white men, higher ejaculation frequency was not related to increased risk of prostate cancer. Our results suggest that high ejaculation frequency possibly may be associated with a lower risk of total and organ-confined prostate cancer. These associations were not explained by potential risk factors for prostate cancer, such as age, family history of prostate cancer, history of syphilis or gonorrhea, smoking, and diet," explained the authors.