The Hardin County resident was diagnosed in March 1999 when he was 77 years old. I had gone in for surgery for a knee replacement in 98, and the doctors told me then I had an enlarged prostate, and to have it checked in six months, he says. They did a biopsy and sent it to Mayo in Rochester for confirmation. There is an apparent link between farming and the cancer, says Charles Lynch, professor at the University of Iowa Medical College and director of the Agricultural Health Study. Lynch is expecting to see 1,950 new cases of diagnosed prostate cancer for the first time in Iowa this year.
Prostate cancer accounts for one-fourth of all new cancer cases.
We ll see about 6,000 new cases of cancers in men this year, says Lynch. Lynch, also medical director of the Iowa Cancer Registry, participated in a study that followed 1,177 Iowa men for nine years, tracking incidents of prostate cancer. We found that after we adjusted for diet, alcohol and tobacco use that farmers have a 70 percent increase in prostate cancer risk than non-farmers, he says. After excluding localized prostate cancer, the data showed an even stronger association between farmers and cancer, and that risk increased with the number of years farming. The limitation of this study is that we knew whether they were farmers or not, but we didn t know what they did on the farm, Lynch says.