Dairy Product Consumption and Prostate Cancer Risk in the United States

An ongoing controversy exists regarding the effect of dairy products on prostate cancer risk in observational studies. We prospectively investigated the associations between dairy product consumption and prostate cancer risk among men in the United States. After calculating pre-diagnostic intake of individual or subgroups of dairy products using a validated food frequency questionnaire, we estimated hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for pathologically-verified cases of incident prostate cancer among men, overall, or stratified by severity. Among 49,472 men, 4134 were diagnosed with prostate cancer during an average follow-up period of 11.2 years. The median total dairy intake was 101 g/1000 kcal. Consumption of total, individual, or subgroups of dairy products was not statistically significantly associated with prostate cancer risk overall (HR = 1.05, 95% CI = 0.96-1.15 comparing the highest with lowest quartile) or stratified by severity, except for regular-fat dairy product intake with late-stage prostate cancer risk (HR = 1.37, 95% CI = 1.04-1.82 comparing the highest with lowest quartile) and 2%-fat milk intake with advanced prostate cancer risk (HR = 1.14, 95% CI = 1.02-1.28 comparing the higher than median intake with no intake group). Our findings do not support the previously reported harmful impact of dairy consumption on overall prostate cancer risk among men in the United States.