Marijuana Linked to Aggressive Testicular Cancer

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But the prospect of a causal relationship between marijuana use and testicular cancer raised a lot of unanswered questions for Gary Schwartz, an associate professor in both the department of cancer biology and the department of epidemiology and prevention at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.

"The consensus is that most testicular cancer is thought to originate with lesions in utero, and that the peak age for testicular cancer to actually occur begins, really, right after adolescence," he noted. "That's when hormones released during puberty appear to promote [full-blown] cancer by essentially throwing fuel on the lesion fire, following a relatively long latency. The point being that you don't suddenly wake up one morning with a tumor. So it's a little hard to understand how exposure to marijuana beginning at that point could somehow play an immediate causal role."

"But certainly, the idea that cannabis may cause cancer cells to proliferate is interesting," Schwartz acknowledged. "It could, however, also be that recreational drug use is simply a marker for affluence, since we know that testicular cancer is traditionally a disease that is more common among the affluent. Or it could be a marker for some other event that comes along with it, that triggers lesions that lead to tumors. So, at this point, it's just not clear to me how exactly the association between marijuana and testicular cancer would work."

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More information

The American Cancer Society has more on marijuana use and cancer.

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