London, Europe Brief News – A study, published in the journal Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, revealed that men face a higher risk of most cancers than women.
The study reveals that the cause may be underlying biological sex differences rather than behavioral differences related to smoking, alcohol use, diet, and other factors.
Sarah S. JacksonTrusted Source, PhD, a research scholar with the National Cancer Institute, and her colleagues set out to assess differences in cancer risk for men and women in 21 cancer sites.
The study included 171,274 male and 122,826 female adults aged 50 to 71 years who were participating in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health StudyTrusted Source from 1995 to 2011.
During that time, 17,951 new cancers arose in men and 8,742 in women.
The researchers say the findings suggest that biological differences between sexes — such as physiological, immunological, and genetic factors — play a major role in the cancer susceptibility of men versus women.
“Our results show that there are differences in cancer incidence that are not explained by environmental exposures alone. This suggests that there are intrinsic biological differences between men and women that affect susceptibility to cancer,” Jackson told Healthline.
“We found that after controlling for factors like smoking, alcohol use, diet, physical activity, and common medical conditions, the sex bias remained for most cancers,” she added.
