A major study conducted at the London Institute for Prostate Cancer has determined that men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer are nearly twenty-five times as likely to die from the disease as men who are prostate-cancer free.
This conclusion was reached after researchers had carefully recorded the causes of death of more than 300,000 men.
Among the subjects in Group P (men diagnosed with prostate cancer), nearly 90 percent died from the disease. Among the individuals in Group N (men who had not been diagnosed with prostate cancer), only two percent died from the disease.
According to Trevor Wellsley, MB BCHir, “These results confirm what we have long suspected: prostate cancer is the leading cause of death among men with prostate cancer.”
Researchers had been stymied in the past by a small but statistically significant number of men who were discovered to have prostate cancer after they had died in automobile smashups, domestic disputes, or other life-ending events.
“This led to the supposition that prostate cancer might not be, after all, a death sentence,” said Mr. Wellsley. “We began to suspect there might be a link between prostate cancer and careless driving or, perhaps, between prostate cancer and domestic violence; but those avenues of investigation lead us up dead-end streets, as it were.”
Mr. Wellsley said it was too early to speculate why two percent of the subjects in Group N, whose members had all been pronounced cancer-free, died from prostate cancer anyway. “Off the top of my head,” he observed, “those findings may indicate a particularly virulent form of the disease, or they might be the result of a statistical anomaly or the research team’s unfamiliarity with the new Windows 7 operating system.
“There can be no doubt, however,” he concluded, “that prostate cancer needs to be taken seriously by persons who have it.” In related news, a new study linking prostate cancer to multivitamin consumption has been criticized for failing to differentiate between men who take multivitamins orally and those who take them rectally.