Abstract

Men are more likely to develop cancer than women. In fact, male predominance is one of the most consistent cancer epidemiology findings. Additionally, men have a poorer prognosis and an increased risk of secondary malignancies compared to women. These differences have been investigated in order to better understand cancer and to better treat both men and women. In this review, we discuss factors that may cause this gender difference, focusing on urothelial bladder cancer (UBC) pathogenesis. We consider physiological factors that may cause higher male cancer rates, including differences in X chromosome gene expression. We discuss how androgens may promote bladder cancer development directly by stimulating bladder urothelium and indirectly by suppressing immunity. We are particularly interested in the role of natural killer (NK) cells in anti-cancer immunity.

Document Type

Review

Publication Date

11-4-2021

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Journal of Clinical Medicine, v. 10, issue 21, 5163.

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm10215163

Funding Information

Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Kentucky. The UK Flow Cytometry and Immune Monitoring core facility is supported in part by the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Markey Cancer Center, and an NCI Center Core Support Grant (P30 CA177558) to the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center.

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Data will be made available upon request to the first author.

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