Abstract

There has been considerable interest in recent years in the role of soy in cancer etiology. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to evaluate epidemiologic studies available to date that related soy consumption to the risk of prostate cancer in men. We conducted a thorough Medline search for English-language publications, supplemented with hand-searching of articles' bibliographies and nonindexed medical and professional journals, on epidemiologic studies of soy and prostate cancer. We identified 2 cohort and 6 case-control studies that met the following criteria for meta-analysis: a study must have assessed soy as a food and provided a risk estimate (relative risk or odds ratio) and its 95% confidence interval. Data from the same study population appearing in different journals were only used once with the most recent publication chosen for the analysis. Studies on fermented soy food were not included. We conducted the meta-analysis using a random-effects model. An analysis of these studies yielded an overall risk estimate of 0.70 (95% CI = 0.59-0.83; p < 0.001). No publication bias was detected. In summary, results of the analysis showed that consumption of soy food was associated with a lower risk of prostate cancer in men.

Copyright 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc.