There is more bad news for smokers. Smokers will not only have higher risk of getting a lung cancer but they are more likely to have severe tumors and higher chance of death when they get prostate cancer compared to non-smokers according to new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and University of California, San Francisco.

In our study, we found similar results for both prostate cancer recurrence and prostate cancer mortality, said Stacey Kenfield, lead author and a research associate in the HSPH Department of Epidemiology. These data taken together provide further support that smoking may increase risk of prostate cancer progression.

The study involved 5,366 men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study who had prostate cancer between 1986 and 2006.

Current smokers had a 61 percent increased risk of prostate cancer, and a 61 percent increased risk or recurrence compared with men who never smoked, according to the study.

Compared with current smokers, men with prostate cancer who had quit smoking for 10 or more years, or who had quit for less than 10 years but smoked less than 20 pack-years before diagnosis, had prostate cancer mortality risk similar to men who had never smoked. Men who had quit smoking for less than 10 years and had smoked 20 or more pack-years had risks similar to current smokers, the HSPH said in a news release.

Prostate cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in men. One in six U.S men is diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetimes.

More than two million men in the U.S. and 16 million men globally are prostate cancer survivors.

The study will be published in the June 22-29 volume of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

California California Medicine California