MedWire News: Men with high levels of calcium in their blood face an increased risk of fatal prostate cancer, US study findings suggest.

However, co-researcher Dr Halcyon Skinner, from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, stressed that there is "little relationship between calcium in the diet and calcium in serum [blood]. So men needn't be concerned about reducing their ordinary dietary intakes of calcium."

Dr Skinner and Dr Gary Schwartz, from the Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, studied data on 2814 men who participated in a long-term health study.

The participants' blood levels of calcium were measured at the start of the study and they were monitored for nearly 10 years.

Over the course of the study, 85 men developed prostate cancer and 25 died from the disease.

Analysis revealed that men with high blood-calcium levels were, overall, 1.3 times more likely to develop prostate cancer than those with low levels of the mineral.

However, the risk of fatal prostate cancer associated with high blood levels of calcium was even greater.

Indeed, men in the group with the highest levels of blood calcium were over 2.6 times more likely to develop fatal prostate cancer than those in the group with the lowest blood levels of the mineral.

"These results support the hypothesis that high serum calcium or a factor strongly associated with it... increases the risk for fatal prostate cancer," the researchers write in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

Dr Schwartz added that if the relationship between blood calcium levels and prostate cancer is confirmed in further studies, "it suggests a means for potentially reducing the risk of fatal disease through medicines that reduce serum levels of calcium."