Background: African American men suffer disproportionately from prostate cancer. Evidence suggests that hyperlipidemia may increase prostate cancer risk; however, studies examining the disease processes within African American men are limited. We evaluated hyperlipidemia in African American men with and without prostate cancer (PCa) to investigate new and existing associations of serum lipid levels and prostate cancer risk.

Methods: From 2000 to 2004, 250 African American men, aged 40-97 years were recruited from an urban academic urology clinic. Cases had histologically confirmed prostate cancer. Controls were men without clinical cancer who were seen at the same clinic. Hyperlipidemia was defined as patient having one or more of the following: high triglycerides (>200mg/dL), high LDL (>160mg/dL), and/or high total cholesterol(>240mg/dL) serum levels. Binary logistic regression was used to calculate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) between lipid exposures and PCa. The adjusted model included age,family history of prostate cancer, obesity, alcohol use, annual income, and Gleason index.

Results: From the patient population, we obtained 141 incident PCa cases and 109 healthy controls. We observed a significant association between hyperlipidemia (OR= 1.7 [1.0-3.1]; unadjusted) and PCa, as well as hypertriglyceridemia (OR= 2.1[1.0-4.5]; adjusted) and PCa. Hypertriglyceridemia showed significant associations with aggressive disease (Gleason≥7) in both unadjusted (OR = 2.8[1.1–7.4]) and adjusted models (OR = 3.5 [1.1–10.7]). Both income (OR=2.2[1.1-4.0]) and alcohol (OR=0.5[0.3-0.9]) were significantly associated with PCa. Furthermore, we observed significant interaction between hyperlipidemia and obesity (OR=4.7[1.0-21.8]; adjusted). There were no associations found between hypercholesterolemia or elevated LDL serum and PCa.

Conclusions: This study adds to recent evidence that hyperlipidemia has a positive relationship with PCa in African American men.

Citation Format: Sparkle Springfield, Adam Murphy, Beverly Ifeanyi Chukwudozie, Iman Martin, Chiledum Ahaghotu, Rick Kittles. Hyperlipidemia and prostate cancer in African American men. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Seventh AACR Conference on The Science of Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; Nov 9-12, 2014; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2015;24(10 Suppl):Abstract nr B41.

©2015 American Association for Cancer Research.
2015