Health
There's One Surprisingly Huge Health Benefit to Ejaculation
If you're a man
worried about developing prostate cancer, there appears to be at least one
preventative step you can take to lower your risk from the comfort of your own
bedroom.
Several
studies have linked frequent
ejaculation — during sex, masturbation, or while you're sleeping — to reduced
risk of prostate cancer.
How much of a difference can ejaculating really make?
According to
a 2016 study published in
the journal European Urology, quite a bit.
Researchers
surveyed 32,000 men from 1992 to 2010 and found that participants who reported
ejaculating at least 21 times per month during their 20s were 19 percent less
likely to develop prostate cancer than those who ejaculated seven times per
month or less.
Frequent ejaculation during your 40s also appears to reduce your prostate cancer risk by 22 percent, the study found.
"While our
findings should be confirmed in studies that evaluate the potential biological
mechanisms underlying the observed associations, the results of our study
suggest that ejaculation and safe sexual activity throughout adulthood could be
a beneficial strategy for reducing the risk of prostate cancer," Jennifer Rider,
lead author of the study, said in a press
release.
There's no magic
number of times a person should ejaculate to reduce their risk. What the study
findings suggest is a dose-dependent relationship, where the risk becomes lower
the more frequently a person ejaculates.
This isn't
the first time that researchers have studied how ejaculation affects cancer
risk. In 2003, a team of Australian researchers compared ejaculation frequency among about 2,300 men — half of
whom had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The results showed that
ejaculating five to seven times per week were 36 percent less likely to develop
prostate cancer compared to those who ejaculated less than two times per
week.
While the results have been consistent, researchers aren't certain about why ejaculating seems to reduce the risk of prostate cancer.
Riders told Reuters that her
team had one theory about the connection: "Ejaculation frequency is, to some
extent, a measure of overall health status in that men at the very low end of
ejaculation — zero to three times per month — were more likely to have other
[medical problems] and die prematurely from causes other than prostate
cancer."
Still, further
research is needed to identify the biological mechanism responsible for reducing
the risk.
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