CHICAGO – Smoking increases the risk that men who develop prostate cancer will die from their disease, US researchers said yesterday.

The longer the men smoked, the greater the risk, said Stacey Kenfield of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr Kenfield and colleagues studied 5,366 men diagnosed with prostate cancer between 1986 and 2006.

“We compared current smokers to never smokers. Compared to never smokers, current smokers had a 61 per cent increased risk of dying of prostate cancer, as well as a 61 per cent increased risk of having their cancer return,” Dr Kenfield said.

But men who quit smoking at least a decade before they developed cancer appeared to be able to avoid that increased risk. Prostate cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in men behind lung cancer. – (Reuters)