New research from the University of Montreal and the Institut Armand Frappier (Canada) proposes that having more than 20 sexual partners throughout life is an effective way to prevent prostate cancer in men . The study has been published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology .
The study analyzed the results of “Proteus” , an investigation in which 3,208 men completed a questionnaire regarding their sexual life. Of all of them, 1,590 were diagnosed with prostate cancer and the control group was made up of the rest of the selected ones, 1,618 men.
The conclusions were very clear: those who had had sex with more than 20 women had a 28% lower risk of developing prostate cancer , compared to those who had had only one partner throughout their lives (monogamous, therefore) . They also had a 19% lower risk for the most aggressive cancers. Regarding homosexual relationships, this trend was completely the opposite: those who had more than 20 male partners had twice the risk of developing prostate cancer than those who had never had sex with men.
“It is possible that by having many female sexual partners they have had a higher frequency of ejaculations , whose protective effect against prostate cancer has been previously observed in some studies,” explains Marie-Elise Parent, co-author of the study.
Regarding the factors that influence these differences between heterosexual and homosexual sex in the face of prostate cancer, scientists do not know for the moment. They believe that “it could be related to greater exposure to sexually transmitted diseases, or it could be that anal intercourse causes more physical trauma to the prostate,” says Patern.
