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Originally Posted by purplestraws  The only person who has told me that I need to retract DS' foreskin is my dad...His big thing was that it prevents cancer of the penis, but when I told him that men are 5x more likely to get breast cancer than penile cancer...he lost it and started yelling at me
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I had a fascinating discussion with a prominent doctor about this a few years ago. He says the "prevents penile cancer" thing is a complete myth -- circumcised men can and do get penile cancer, though it is extremely rare in
all men, cut or not. What intact men can get is cancer of the foreskin -- über-rare -- which cut men obviously cannot, and those stats just get lumped in with penile cancer stats.
The whole myth started when a few doctors noticed that the patients presenting with this rare cancer were uncut. Well, it seems the reason for this is that most were in their 80's, and with the circumcision demographics in the United States this dramatically increased the likelihood that they would be intact. (An 80-year-old man in 1960 would have been born in 1880.) The simple truth is that there were
many more uncut than cut men in that age group when this issue first started getting press.
But fast-forward to 2009, and what the medical profession is noticing is really no difference in penile cancer prevalence in either cut or uncut men, since there are now millions more senior citizen men who are circumcised.
The old logic of: all the patients this year with penile cancer are intact --> therefore penile cancer only affects intact men, was naïvely wrong. It's just that there was a disproportionate number of uncut men in that demographic when it was noted. As the numbers have shifted, suddenly the cases of cut men with penile cancer have surfaced. Duh!
The true risk factors are smoking, HPV, and advanced age, and these can be present in any male.
