A new research found that naturally red-headed men are 54% less likely to develop prostate cancer as those with blond, brown or black hair.
Why hair color should be such a powerful influence on cancer risk is not clear.
Scientists behind the findings, published online in the British Journal of Cancer, think it might be to do with the way genes that dictate hair pigmentation also influence tumor development.
Britain has some of the largest numbers of ginger-haired people per head of population. Globally, the figure is 1-2%, but it is 13% in Scotland, 10% in Ireland and 6% in England.
Previous studies have hinted that having red hair affects health in other ways.
Red-headed men are 54 percent less likely to develop prostate cancer
Scientists at Louisville University in Kentucky, found ginger-haired people feel pain and the cold more than everybody else because their pain threshold may be partly dictated by the same gene that sets their hair color – MC1R.
Red-heads, being fair skinned, are also known to be more at risk of skin cancer.
Researchers from Finland’s National Institute for Health and Medicine, in Helsinki, and the US National Cancer Institute, based in Maryland, wanted to see if the same genetic factors also influenced a man’s chances of prostate cancer.
The researchers looked at 20,000 men aged 50 to 69 who were recruited to a long-term health study in the late 1980s.
Among the data collected were records of what color their hair was aged 20.
Researchers found that 1,982 men went on to develop prostate cancer.
Researchers stressed that only 1% of the men studied had red hair, compared to more than 40% with light brown hair.
Scientists think it is possible that the MC1R gene may help to control the way some cells divide and grow
Taking a daily dose of aspirin could cut bowel cancer patients’ chance of dying from the disease by about a third, say experts.
The study published in the British Journal of Cancer looked at 4,500 bowel cancer patients living in The Netherlands.
All of the patients on aspirin were taking a low dose – 80 mg or less a day – something already recommended for people with heart disease.
But experts say it is too soon to start routinely offering it for bowel cancer.
A wealth of evidence already suggests aspirin might prevent certain cancers from developing in the first place. And more recent work suggests it might also work as a cancer therapy – slowing down or preventing a cancer’s spread.
But the drug can also have unpleasant and dangerous side effects, causing irritation of the stomach lining and internal bleeds in a very small minority of patients.
In the study, which spanned nearly a decade, a quarter of the patients did not use aspirin, a quarter only took aspirin after being diagnosed with bowel cancer, and the remaining half took aspirin both before and after their diagnosis.
Most of the patients on aspirin had been taking it to prevent cardiovascular disease-related problems like stroke or heart attack.
Taking a daily dose of aspirin could cut bowel cancer patients’ chance of dying from the disease by about a third
Taking aspirin for any length of time after diagnosis cut the chance of dying from bowel cancer by 23%.
The patients who took a daily dose of aspirin for at least nine months after their diagnosis cut their chance of dying from the disease by 30%.
Taking aspirin only after bowel cancer had been detected had a bigger impact on reducing mortality compared with when aspirin was taken before and after diagnosis – reducing death risk by 12%.
This may be because those who took aspirin and still got bowel cancer had a particularly aggressive form of tumor that did not respond as well to aspirin, say the researchers.
Lead researcher Dr. Gerrit-Jan Liefers, of the Leiden University Medical Centre, said: “Our work adds to growing evidence that aspirin not only can prevent cancer from occurring but if it is there it can help prevent it spreading.”
He said aspirin should not be seen as an alternative to other treatments, such as chemotherapy, but could be a useful additional treatment.
“It’s possible that some older people may have other health problems which mean that they are not well enough to have chemotherapy. Bowel cancer is more common in older people so these results could be a big advance in treatment of the disease, particularly in this group. But we need further research to confirm this.”
Dr. Gerrit-Jan Liefers said they now planned to hold a randomized controlled trial – the “gold standard” in medical research – to look at how well aspirin fared against a dummy drug in people aged over 70 with bowel cancer.
Aspirin
• Active ingredient is acetylsalicylic acid
• Used for many years as a painkiller
• Has an anti-inflammatory action
• Low-dose (75 mg) is already recommended for people with known cardiovascular disease to prevent stroke and heart attack
• Benefits for healthy people are still unclear
• Can cause fatal internal bleeding, although this is relatively rare
