Frequent urination protects against bladder cancer

Washington: Frequent urination at night might be a good thing after all, it protects your bladder against cancer, according to an exhaustive study.
The results indicate that those people who usually get up at night at least twice to pass urine reduced their risk of suffering from bladder cancer by 40 to 59 percent.
This "protective effect" was found in both men and women and did not relate to the consumption of tobacco or the quantity of water they drank.
Night-time is usually the period during which there is the longest interval between urination.
For this reason carcinogenic agents like tobacco "are present in the urine, (that) constitutes an important factor towards the likelihood of developing bladder cancer", explained Juan Alguacil, a researcher from University of Huelva (Spain) and one of the authors of the study.
The research group, made up of Spanish and North American scientists, analysed the urinary frequency in 884 recently diagnosed bladder cancer cases and in 996 non-cancer 'control patients', from five regions in Spain.
The patients, aged between 21 and 80 years, came from 18 hospitals in Vallés, Barcelona, Asturias, Alicante and Tenerife, according to a release of Plataforma SINC.
The study authors underlined that "it would be necessary to transport this discovery from the lab to the hospital in order to achieve the prevention of almost 357,000 new cases diagnosed every year globally and 145,000 deaths.
Although the best advice is to avoid exposure to stop smoking and to avoid direct contact with chemical products or pollution particles, the risk of bladder cancer could be reduced by increasing urinary frequency and drinking more water.
The research appeared recently in the International Journal of Cancer. [From Internet]