**5. Sex hormones**

As stated in the introduction in obese levels of sex hormones are different from that observed in normal weight people. Prostate is hormone-sensitive gland and therefore androgens are needed for its development.

Also prostate cancer is hormone-sensitive and testosterone is known to accelerate its progression to advanced and metastatic form while estrogens inhibit such progress. This finding led us to application of castration (surgical or pharmacological) in the treatment of advanced or metastatic prostate cancer.

However, the relation between dishormonese and prostate cancer is not so unequivocal. Testosterone also influences the differentiation of prostate cells (but not prostate cancer cells) to mature forms, while estrogens have contrary impact and therefore may lead to poorly differentiated Pca (Massengill et al. 2003; Schatzl et al., 2001).
