Men, look at your hands. If your index finger is longer than your ring finger (or fourth finger), you run a significantly lower risk of developing prostate cancer, according to a study from Warwick University and the Institute of Cancer Research in Britain.
How much? For older men, the risk drops by a third, and it's even greater in younger men. Best of all, this allows physicians a fast and no-cost way to identify which men should undergo regular prostate screening, especially in combination with genetic testing or other risk factors, such as a family history of the disease, reports AFP.
The study: Led by Ros Eeles, the team collected data on more than 1,500 prostate cancer patients in Britain, as well as 3,000 healthy men who served as a control group.
The results: Half the men had an index finger that was shorter than their ring finger. Compared to this group, men whose index and ring fingers were the same length, which was 19 percent of the men, had a similar prostate cancer risk. But if the index finger was longer, the risk of developing the disease dropped by 33 percent.
AFP notes that the relative length of the index and ring fingers, which is set before birth, appears to be a marker of different levels of sex hormones to which a fetus is exposed in the womb. Less testosterone correlates with a longer index finger. Previous research has shown that testosterone promotes the growth of prostate cancer.
The unexpected link between those two fingers and prostate cancer are two genes, HOXA and HOXD, both of which control finger length and the development of sex organs.
The study findings were published in the British Journal of Cancer.
--From the Editors at Netscape
