Baldness and other correlates of sex hormones in relation to testicular cancer

Abstract

There is evidence that sex hormones and intrauterine factors are involved in the etiology of testicular cancer. We evaluated the importance of perinatal and adult life correlates of sex hormones as risk factors for testicular cancer in a case control study of 97 incident, histologically confirmed cases, residents of the Greater Athens area and environs, who were diagnosed in the 3 specialized cancer hospitals and the major General Hospital in Athens during the 2 year period 1993-94. Cases were age-matched to 2 healthy controls from the same study base. Both cases and controls as well as their mothers were interviewed by the same investigator and the data were analyzed through conditional logistic regression. The odds ratio for testicular cancer was elevated among persons born after a pregnancy characterized by severe nausea. Among the adult life factors, higher body mass was associated with reduced risk, as was evidence of baldness. To the extent that nausea during pregnancy reflects higher levels of pregnancy estrogens on the one hand, and baldness is linked to androgens on the other, our data suggest that estrogens in the intrauterine life and androgens at later stages may have sequential opposing effects for the development of testicular cancer. Int. J. Cancer 71:982-985, 1997.

Birth weight and the risk of testicular cancer: A meta‐analysis

“…The high heterogeneity among the studies seems to be due to the effect of the studies by Aschim et al 32 and Brown et al, 13 (when excluding them from the analysis p for heterogeneity 5 0.39, I 2 5 5.3% with OR 5 1.30, 95% CI: 1.09-1.54 -fixed-effects model).…”

“…The cases in these studies were born between 1920 and 1998 and were found from cancer registries, except 2 13,36 that used hospital records. The source for birth weight was birth registries 11,31,32,34,35,38 or interviews and questionnaires. 12,13,[15][16][17]33,36 Three of the studies did not give data for the high birth weight stratum and were not included in the relevant analysis.…”

“…Nine of the 13 studies included in the meta-analysis on the association of low birth weight with testicular cancer risk suggested a positive association, [11][12][13]15,17,33,34,37,38 although the association was statistically significant in only 4 of them. [11][12][13]15 In 2 studies no association was found 16,35 and in 2 others an inverse association was observed 32,36 which was statistically significant in 1 study. 32 There was an overall statistically significant association between low birth weight and higher risk for testicular cancer (OR 5 1.18, 95% CI: 1.01-1.38), although effect estimates were heterogeneous across reviewed studies (p for heterogeneity 5 0.005, I…”

“…[11][12][13]15 In 2 studies no association was found 16,35 and in 2 others an inverse association was observed 32,36 which was statistically significant in 1 study. 32 There was an overall statistically significant association between low birth weight and higher risk for testicular cancer (OR 5 1.18, 95% CI: 1.01-1.38), although effect estimates were heterogeneous across reviewed studies (p for heterogeneity 5 0.005, I…”

Tallness is associated with risk of testicular cancer: evidence for the nutrition hypothesis

“…Nine other studies had failed to demonstrate a significant correlation of body size with GCT risk (Whittemore et al, 1984;Swerdlow et al, 1989;Thune and Lund, 1994;UK Testicular Cancer Study Group, 1994;Davies et al, 1990Davies et al, , 1996Petridou et al, 1997;Bjørge et al, 2006;Stang et al, 2006). However, it should be noted that three of these investigations found OR of borderline to be nonsignificant (Swerdlow et al, 1989;UK Testicular Cancer Study Group, 1994;Stang et al, 2006), and two disclosed significant associations with only one histological group of GCT (Bjørge et al, 2006;Stang et al, 2006).…”