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Exposure to any of the marked 22 pesticides can spike the risk of developing prostate cancer among men, a new study has revealed. The research, conducted over decades since prostate cancer grows extremely slowly, was conducted by Stanford University, California.

The researchers, led by Dr. Simon John Christoph Soerensen, studied in detail the US data on county-level usage of nearly 300 pesticides and they compared those results to rates of prostate cancer in counties across the United States.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men and the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Experts say it grows slowly, and if it doesn't spread to other parts of the body, this cancer may not cause serious problems. However, it can sometimes grow quickly and spread, which is more serious.

To account for the ten to 18-year lag time between carcinogen exposure and the time it takes prostate cancers to grow, Soerensen's group looked at pesticide-use data from 1997 through 2001. After that, they compared the data to rates of prostate cancer for the years 2016 through 2020.

The researchers deduced that all together, 22 pesticides had associations with upped prostate cancer risk, although the study could not prove cause-and-effect. Three of the pesticides had already been linked previously to cancer, including 2-4-D, a commonly used pesticide in the United States.

Of the other 19 pesticides, 10 were herbicides, while the others included fungicides and insecticides, plus a soil fumigant, the researchers reported in the study published in the journal Cancer. High exposures to four of the pesticides were linked to the development of prostate cancer plus death from the disease.

Those chemicals included trifluralin, cloransulam-methyl, and diflufenzopyr, plus one insecticide, thiamethoxam, the Stanford team said. Of those four, only trifluralin is currently classed by the Environmental Protection Agency as a "possible human carcinogen," the team pointed out. The other three have been designated by the EPA as either “not likely to be carcinogenic” or having evidence of “non-carcinogenicity.”

“This research demonstrates the importance of studying environmental exposures, such as pesticide use, to potentially explain some of the geographic variations we observe in prostate cancer incidence and deaths across the United States,” Soerensen, a graduate student in epidemiology at Stanford, said in a journal news release.

“By building on these findings, we can advance our efforts to pinpoint risk factors for prostate cancer and work towards reducing the number of men affected by this disease.”

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