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Finger Length Could Point to Prostate Cancer Risk

Men may hold the future in the palm of their hands -- or more specifically, in the tips of their fingers if they're wanting to know their chances of getting prostate cancer later in life.

A new study has found that men whose index fingers are shorter than their ring fingers have a greater risk of getting the disease than those whose index fingers are longer than their ring fingers.

Those with longer first fingers are a third less likely to develop prostate cancer, according to researchers from the U.K.'s University of Warwick and the Institute of Cancer.

Previous studies have shown men with longer ring fingers may exhibit more traditionally "masculine" traits like aggressiveness because they are believed to have been exposed to more testosterone in the womb, according to LiveScience.
"The genes involved in how the hand grows seem also to be involved in how the testicles develop," Peter Hurd, a psychology professor at the University of Alberta in Canada who has researched finger length but didn't participate in this study, told LiveScience.

The reason behind the link between finger size and prostate cancer seems to stem from a pair of genes responsible for both sexual growth and finger length called HOXA and HOXD.

Researchers measured the fingers of 3,000 healthy men and 1,500 with prostate cancer over a 15-year period. Participants were told to look at photos of hands and choose those that most closely resembled their own.

Men whose index fingers were longer than their ring fingers were 33 percent less likely to have prostate cancer than those whose ring fingers were bigger. The risk was 87 percent lower in men younger than 60.

There was no difference between the men whose fingers were the same length and those whose ring fingers were longer than their index fingers, the authors said.

Still the numbers are still fairly modest.

"Thirty-three percent is still a pretty small effect, so it doesn't make sense for men to look at their own hands and think, 'Oh, I better get screened,'" Hurd said.

Prostate cancer is already known to be associated with men's sensitivity to testosterone.

During the unborn male baby's development, the amount of testosterone produced by the testicles has an impact on the masculine features of the brain, as well as on the size of the fingers. Typically, males with shorter index fingers than ring fingers produced more testosterone in utero -- though scientists say other factors like genetics are also involved.

The findings were published this week in the British Journal of Cancer.

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