What if I told you that ejaculating more might actually reduce your risk for prostate cancer
well don't just take my word for it let's dive deep into the science behind this
I'm Dr. Rena Malik, urologist and pelvic surgeon, and if you like my content make
sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss any of my new videos.
So why does this even matter? Well, prostate cancer affects one in eight men during their
lifetime that is not a small number of people if you look at my subscriber base I have nearly 400
000 subscribers of them 90 are men and if you even go with a rate of 1 in 10 because not everyone is
in the united states where that number is one and eight and some countries have a lower incidence of
prostate cancer you can estimate that at least 30 000 of the people who follow me or subscribe to me
will develop prostate cancer that's a large number of people so yeah if we can modify something in
our own behavior that can help reduce prostate cancer risk well why not why would ejaculation
have anything to do with prostate cancer well for those of you who don't know the prostate's primary
function is to create fluid that you secrete during ejaculation that actually nourishes
and protects sperm and so that fluid essentially builds up in the prostate in between ejaculations
there are a few theories as to why ejaculation may be correlated with prostate cancer or not having
enough ejaculation and the number one predominant theory is called the prostate stagnation
hypothesis and what that is is that over time if you're not releasing that fluid you can get
carcinogenic secretions or secretions that are concerning for cancer promotion and that actually
can then cause the development of prostate cancer there are also some other theories that may be
that when you're ejaculating more frequently you may have lower psychological stress which can also
be correlated with developing cancers and the last theory is that having normal rates of ejaculation
or more frequent ejaculation allows for what we call a normal prostate microbiome and also
normal function of the prostate cells in regards to zinc and citrate metabolism which are important
for prevention of prostate cancer so at the end of the day there are reasons why people thought this
was an interesting question to study and what did they actually do to study this so there's a couple
really interesting things this study was actually a survey done of over 40 000 men in 1992 and they
followed these men up until 2010 and why is this important well prostate cancer is a really slow
growing disease and so what that means is that you have to follow people over greater than 10 years
to really see if the thing that you're seeing 10 years prior actually made a difference on their
development of prostate cancer and so they took men and they had them answer a number of different
questions and one of them was about on average how many ejaculations did you have per month during
these 10 years and the 10 years were between ages of 20 to 29 40 to 49 so on and so forth and so
people had to kind of think back and remember and estimate how often they were ejaculating during
that decade of life and these men were asked to take surveys every other month they also asked
them about their physical activity level their weight their smoking history if they ate processed
meat tomato based products alpha linoleic acid if they've ever used a multivitamin if they had
life stressors like divorce going on and just a number of different questions so they did
try to control for all these factors in the final analysis to determine if ejaculation frequency was
indeed correlated with a lower risk of prostate cancer and one important thing that came out of
the study is they actually saw what ejaculation frequency was in this large cohort of men over
decades of life and it was very common to see that ejaculation frequency decreased with age so when
they looked at men who had ejaculated at least 13 times per month between the decades of to 29 about
57 of men said that they had ejected at least 13 times or greater but that dropped down to about 32
percent at the age of 40 to 49. so then when they looked at all the data they kind of categorized
all these men into different categories and those that ejected zero to three times there were very
few men that fell into that category so they didn't use that as their comparison and so they
then compared those who ejected 21 times or more to those who ejected four to seven times per month
I mean 21 times is a lot that's like five or more times a week to ejaculate right that's a
lot of time to ejaculate and so by the time they looked at all this data these men were on average
about 59 years of age and they saw that the men who ejaculated between the ages of 20 and 29
and 40 to 49 who ejected 21 times or more compared to those who ejected four to seven times
had a 20 percent less likelihood of getting a low risk prostate cancer this wasn't true for high
risk prostate cancer or more aggressive prostate cancers with metastasis but certainly a low risk
prostate cancer they were 20 less likely to get this diagnosis so the reason I brought
this study up the study was done in 2016 but the reason I wanted to talk about today was because
I just started seeing news articles posting about this paper again about two weeks ago and
so I said you know what let's talk about this because all the articles just said ejaculate
more often so is that what you really should do well I think you have to look at these studies
critically and this was a really well designed study they followed people for a long period
of time they had really an excellent team of researchers and statisticians and they controlled
for a lot of different factors that might also be causing a lower risk of prostate cancer
but you have to think about it those who are ejecting 21 times or more every month are probably
either a different type of person altogether than someone who's ejaculating four to seven
times they might be more physically active or more physically fit so they're having more intercourse
more often so I think the real question is you know should you start ejaculating more often
based on the data of this study well I would say that while this is a really well done study
and they controlled for a lot of factors like physical activity stress food intake carcinogens
in food lots of things like that it's still not a hundred percent sure or clear to me that we should
be prescribing all men to ejaculate 21 times a month so that they don't get prostate cancer I
think it's an important question I think that if you are ejaculating very often I think that's not
a bad thing and you can certainly continue to do that and if you're holding back because you think
it's bad for you well probably it's not bad for you and you can go ahead and ejaculate more often
but when I tell you have to do it to the detriment of your social life and physical functioning and
everything else that you do normally during the course of a month no I don't think so so I hope
this is interesting to you all I thought it was interesting and so I wanted to share it with you
guys thank you so much for watching as always take care of yourself because you're worth it