A research team led by Professor Hyun-Jung Jeong of the Department of Urology at Seoul Boramae Hospital investigated the relationship between blood vitamin D levels in men and the risk of prostate cancer and recently published the results.
The research team classified 224 patients who visited the Department of Urology at Boramae Hospital from December 2015 to December 2019 and received a prostate biopsy into three groups, each according to the diagnosis of prostate cancer and the histological severity of the cancer, and performed multivariate logistic regression analysis. To study the association between blood vitamin D levels and prostate cancer progression in subjects.
The researchers defined prostate cancer as ‘clinically significant’ when the Gleason score (GS), which indicates the malignancy of prostate cancer, was 7 or more, and had undergone radical prostatectomy for the treatment of prostate cancer. The association between tumor size and blood vitamin D levels in 36 patients was also compared and analyzed.
As a result of the study, it was found that there was a significant difference in the histological severity and size of prostate cancer according to the level of vitamin D in the blood.
The average blood vitamin D level for each group gradually increased to 19.6 ng/mL, 19.1 ng/mL, and 18.1 ng/mL in the group without prostate cancer, in the clinically insignificant prostate cancer group, and in the clinically significant prostate cancer group, respectively. In multivariate analysis, a negative correlation between the clinically significant prostate cancer diagnosis rate and blood vitamin D levels was confirmed (OR=0.944, p=0.027).
In addition, the blood vitamin D level of the group whose prostate cancer tumor size was above the average of the study subjects was relatively lower than that of the group with below the average (11.2 ng/mL VS 19.2 ng/mL, p
Professor Jung said, “According to previous studies, vitamin D is known to have an anti-proliferative effect by inhibiting angiogenesis in cancer cells, which is believed to be related to the severity of prostate cancer to some extent.”
“Therefore, using the blood vitamin D levels of prostate cancer test subjects will help select prostate cancer patients who need treatment,” he said.
Meanwhile, the results of this study were published in the international academic journal ‘Scientific Reports’ in August. Reporter Jong-ho Jang [email protected]