Heart Healthy = Prostate Healthy and S.A.M. are the Ideal “Natural” Recommendations for Prostate Cancer

Key points

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) preventive strategies via lifestyle, dietary supplement, and pharmacologic agents appear to have the best current evidence for prostate cancer prevention, especially aggressive disease.

Obesity, dyslipidemia, glucose intolerance, lack of exercise, caloric excess, and even metabolic syndrome should be considered prostate cancer risk factors.

Dietary supplements in high-doses that have not been found to prevent CVD and could increase the risk of CVD and could increase the risk of prostate cancer.

Statins, aspirin, and metformin (S.A.M.) are heart healthy, have unique mechanisms of action and appear to be the best potential interventional nontraditional agents for prostate cancer when considering the benefit to risk ratio.

Heart Healthy = Prostate Healthy and Heart Unhealthy = Prostate Unhealthy along with S.A.M. should be a simplistic teaching tool utilized by clinicians to practically and logically reinforce simplistic antiprostate cancer strategies.

Introduction

Men’s health issues should be triaged before recommending and construing any ideal prostate cancer prevention or treatment program. Emphasizing the primary causes of past and current morbidity and mortality allows for an easier understanding of lifestyle, supplement, or pharmacologic additions or deletions. This advice needs to be quick but pithy, simple, logical, and practical for the patient as well as the clinician. When overall health concerns are triaged, it will be easier to construe and advocate for the ideal prostate cancer patient program supported by the phrase heart healthy = prostate healthy.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the number one overall cause of mortality in the United States and in other industrialized countries, and it is currently the number one cause of death worldwide. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States and in most developed countries, and it is expected to equal or surpass the number of deaths from CVD in the future. CVD has been the number one cause of male deaths in the United States for approximately 114 out of the last 115 years, only surpassed one year by the influenza pandemic in 1918 (classified at that time as “diseases of the heart,” CVD ranked number two that year). If a college football team was number one in the United States for virtually 115 years, whether or not one enjoys watching this sport would not be the issue because there would arguably be such dominant awareness and attention paid to this streak because it would be so remarkable and unprecedented. How aware would such a dynasty be to the public and clinicians if it involved more than just football, but individual risk of morbidity and mortality?

If cancer becomes the primary cause of death in the near future, the majority of what is known concerning lifestyle and dietary change for CVD prevention appears to directly apply to cancer prevention and most other prevalent chronic urologic and nonurologic diseases. For example, one of the most significant reductions in early morbidity and mortality rates in US history for CVD and cancer was via a common behavioral/lifestyle change – smoking cessation. The opposite side of this pendulum is also true; for example, the global prevalence of tobacco use remains high and is still the largest preventable cause of death from CVD and cancer. Another example, obesity, which not only continues to increase the risk of CVD, but numerous cancers, diabetes, early morbidity, and mortality, may erase the advances in the declines previously observed in early CVD and cancer mortality from smoking cessation. Over the past 30 plus years not a single country has reported success in combating the obesity epidemic.

Men have a consistently lower life expectancy in most countries, and have a higher morbidity and mortality from heart disease, hypertension, cancer, and diabetes. Yet, heart healthy changes are tantamount to overall men’s health improvements regardless of the part of the human anatomy that is receiving attention, including the prostate and the penis. Heart healthy changes should be advocated to men concerned about prostate cancer because it places research and probability into perspective, which can impact all-cause mortality as well as potentially prevent or slow the progression of prostate cancer.