January 10, 2014
MEDICAL UNIVERSITY of SOUTH CAROLINA
Vol. 32, No. 20
Before Bringing Home THaT Bacon A simple and healthy New Year’s Resolution may be just learning what ‘AGE’ your food is By Dawn Brazell Public Relations
H
ere’s an easy New Year’s resolution to create a healthier you. Add the word AGE or advanced glycation end product to your vocabulary. It’s one you’ll be hearing about more this year, especially if David P. Turner, Ph.D., has anything to do with it. The harder part, though, is what to do when you know what it is. For Turner, who is an assistant professor in the Department Pathology and Laboratory Turner’s Top of Medicine, it meant giving up DieT Tips bacon. However, before anyone panics, there are other simpler See page 7 diet changes he recommends or visit www. that can have a significant musc.edu/pr/ impact on a healthier diet. newscenter/2014/ His recommendations stem AGE.html from what he’s learned in doing cancer health disparities studies in ethnic minorities. One of those studies was presented last month at the sixth American Association for Cancer Research in Cancer Health Disparities conference. It is known that African-American men are 1.5 times more likely to develop prostate cancer and more than twice as likely to die from the disease compared with non-Hispanic white men. “We found that AGE levels were highest in AfricanAmerican men with prostate cancer,” said Turner, “Because obesity, poor eating habits, and an inactive lifestyle all promote AGE accumulation, and these factors are often more evident in African–Americans, we hypothesize that there is a link between these factors
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Fried bacon has an extremely high AGE or advanced glycation end product level, which research is showing may contribute to cancer health disparities. that could help explain why African–American men are more likely to develop prostate cancer and die from the disease.” Turner and colleagues examined circulating AGE levels as well as those within tumors in African– American and non–Hispanic white men with prostate cancer. They found that AGE levels were higher in serum from cancer patients compared with individuals
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without cancer. When analyzing AGE levels in prostate tumor samples, levels were highest in tumor samples from African–American patients. It’s an important finding that warrants future research, and adds to existing evidence that Turner and colleagues want to educate the community about AGEs
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See AGE on page 7 4
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