Higher prostate cancer risk tied to severe acne

New research suggests a link between acne and prostate cancer, but the study’s authors urge caution in interpreting their findings.

Men who had taken tetracycline, an antibiotic used to treat severe acne, for 4 years or longer were 70 percent more likely than men who hadn’t used the drug, or had used it for a shorter time, to develop prostate cancer over a 10-year period, Dr. Siobhan Sutcliffe of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and colleagues found.

“Although intriguing, these findings should be interpreted cautiously,” Sutcliffe and her team say, pointing to the small number of people who had used tetracycline for at least 4 years (just 0.5 percent of the 34,629 men in the study), the indirect assessment of severe acne, and the fact that acne can have multiple, complex causes.

The researchers investigated the acne-prostate cancer link based on recent research that found the acne-related bacterium Propionibacterium acnes in one third of prostate samples taken from men with prostate cancer. The tissue containing P. acnes was more likely to be inflamed, and inflammation is believed to play a key role in the development of prostate cancer.

Sutcliffe and her colleagues evaluated men participating in the Health Professionals Follow-Up study who had provided information on their use of tetracycline in 1992. In the following 10 years, 2,147 developed prostate cancer.

The small percentage of men who had taken tetracycline for 4 years or longer were 1.7-times more likely than those who hadn’t to develop prostate cancer during the study’s follow-up period.

It’s unlikely that tetracycline itself would boost prostate cancer risk, the researchers say, because it is “questionable” whether the drug finds its way into the gland. One possible explanation for an acne-prostate cancer link, they add, is that men who develop severe acne may be more likely to have “stronger inflammatory immune responses” when P. acnes enters the prostate.

“Additional biologic and epidemiologic studies are necessary to determine and elucidate the possible role of P. acnes infection in prostate carcinogenesis,” they conclude.

SOURCE: International Journal of Cancer, December 15, 2007.

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