Published by:
Jackson SS, et al.Cancer. 2022;doi:10.1002/cncr.34390.
Read nextBiological sex differences may explain why men face higher cancer risk than women
Published by:
Jackson SS, et al.Cancer. 2022;doi:10.1002/cncr.34390.
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Key takeaways:
- Men demonstrated a decreased risk for thyroid cancer and gallbladder cancer compared with women.
- Men had higher incidence of bladder cancer, gastric cardia cancer, larynx cancer and esophageal adenocarcinoma.
- Sex bias remained for most cancers after investigators controlled for factors like alcohol use, smoking, physical activity, diet and common medical conditions.
Men appeared to have a higher risk for cancer than women at most shared anatomic sites, according to study results published inCancer.
The findings underscore a role for sex-related biological factors in cancer incidence, investigators concluded.
Background and methods
“There are many cancers that both men andwomenmay develop, specifically those that do not affect the reproductive tract. However, men have higher rates of these nonreproductive cancers than women, with only two nonreproductive cancer types that are more common in women — thyroid and gallbladder,”Sarah S. Jackson, PhD,research fellow and independent research scholar in the infections and immunoepidemiology branch at the NIH, told Healio. “Historically, we have thought this is because women are less likely to smoke or drink and are more likely to eat well and exercise compared with men. This study sought to examine thesex biasin cancer incidence after controlling for those lifestyle factors to see if this explained the male predominance in cancer.”
The prospective cohort analyses included data from 171,274 men and 122,826 women included in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study between 1995 and 2011.
研究人员使用癌症特异性Cox回归模型来估计男性与女性的hr。他们使用彼得斯-贝尔森方法来量化风险因素在多大程度上解释了观察到的男女风险差异。
Estimates of crude and covariate-adjusted male-to-female risk ratios of cancer incidence and quantification of the degree to which covariates/risk factors explained the male-to-female disparity in cancer risk served as the primary analytic goals.
Key findings
The analysis included 3,499,901 person-years of follow-up, with mean follow-up of 11.5 person-years for men and 12.4 person-years for women.
Researchers identified 26,693 incident cancers, of which 17,951 occurred among men and 8,742 among women.
The most common cancer types among men included lung, colon, skin, bladder and kidney cancers. The most common among women included lung, colon, pancreas and kidney cancers.
Researchers noted the highest age-adjusted male-to-female incident rate ratios (IRRs) for esophageal adenocarcinoma (IRR = 12.19; 95% CI, 8.32–17.86) and gastric cardia cancer (IRR = 4.93; 95% CI, 3.59–6.77).
After researchers adjusted for demographic, lifestyle and dietary covariates, they found that men had a lower risk for thyroid cancer (HR = 0.55; 95% CI, 0.46-0.66) and gallbladder cancer (HR = 0.33; 95% CI, 0.18-0.58) than women.
Conversely, they found that men had higher incidence of other cancer types (adjusted HR range, 1.3-10.8), including bladder cancer (HR = 3.33; 95% CI, 95% CI, 2.93-3.79), gastric cardia cancer (HR = 3.49; 95% CI, 2.26-5.37), larynx cancer (HR = 3.53; 95% CI, 2.46-5.06) and esophageal adenocarcinoma (HR = 10.8; 95% CI, 7.33-15.9).
“After controlling for factors like smoking, alcohol use, diet, physical activity and common medical conditions, the sex bias remained for most cancers