Antiperspirants appear associated to current prostate cancer rates

Prostate and breast cancer appear to be homologous cancer in males and females respectively. Both cancers share hormone etiologies and are treated with hormonal manipulation. The incidence of these two hormone-dependent cancers has steadily risen throughout the twentieth century. Both cancers have race-based links: there is a higher incidence of prostate cancer in African-American men than Caucasian men followed by Asian men and under the age of forty, breast cancer is more lethal in African-American women than Caucasian women and Asian women. Beyond genetic and cultural explanations for these differences, an alternative environmental hormone disruptor may be at play as follows.

Through time the underarms have become more occluded as humankind has progressed from hunting and gathering, to farming, to factory work, to office work, with less physical activity via the automobile, and to the desk at a keyboard. And ironically, thermal sweating from physical activity has been usurped by emotional-stress based sweat, potentially affected by daily interference of an underarm endocrine organ by antiperspirants, furthering underarm occlusion and possibly placing men and women in harm’s way.

Thus far, circumstantial historical and multi-discipline observations, although persuasive, are insufficient to conclude an etiological link between antiperspirant and prostate and breast cancer. Further confirmatory investigations are required in an effort to eventually offer prevention and reduced incidence and mortality from the world’s two most common hormone-dependent cancers.