To Lower Your Risk for Prostate Cancer Try Having More Orgasms

image via (cc) flickr user chamz

When British punk band The Buzzcocks released “Orgasm Addict,” their 1977 ode to le petit morte, most people wrote the song—and the band—off as juvenile rockers reveling in sexual explicitness for no reason other than shock value. Little could they have known, however, that The Buzzcocks were actually (I assume) issuing an urgent medical warning to help save lives from a form of cancer. Thankfully, modern medical research has vindicated the punks with the recent announcement that frequent ejaculation may in fact help prevent prostate cancer in men.

At this year’s annual American Urological Association (AUA) meeting, researchers presented the results of an 18-year-long study of over 30,000 men which seemed to confirm the link between more orgasms and less risk for developing prostate cancer. The study, reports Medical Daily, expands upon research published in 2004.

At the start of the study, men aged 20 to 29 and 40 to 49 were asked to calculate the average number of times they ejaculated per month, including the number of times they ejaculated during the previous year. Researchers then used both averages to compute a lifetime average.

Based on those averages, the study dermined that men who ejaculated 21 times per month or more experienced a 20 percent drop in prostate cancer risk, as opposed to those who ejaculated fewer than 10 times in the same time frame.

While medical research has long suspected a correlation between more sex and less prostate cancer, these latest findings represent a tremendous step forward in understanding why the connection exists. That’s due, in part, explains Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health epidemiologist Dr. Jennifer Rider to Medical Daily, to this study's sheer size, longevity, and the fact that it focuses on ejaculation, rather than on sex as a whole.

Though the exact relationship between ejaculation and this form of cancer is unknown, one theory surmises that by ejaculating, men are, in essence, helping clear the prostate of biological detritus with carcinogenic potential.

[via medical daily]