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Dietary spermidine intake is not associated with prostate cancer incidence or prostate cancer-specific mortality: findings from the prostate, lung, colorectal, and ovarian cancer screening trial

Guilin Wang, Jiayi Lin, Zhifeng Lin, Jinhui Jian, Jiongxuan Xu, Jie Xie, Shun Liu, Qingquan Chen, Dewen Zhong

Frontiers in Nutrition 2026 13:1775582

Bibliography

PubMed: PMID 42591195
DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2026.1775582
Funding: The authors reported no financial support for the work or its publication.
Competing interests: The authors declared no commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Study snapshot

Design	Prospective cohort analysis within PLCO
Model	Male PLCO cancer-screening participants
Sample	54,517; 6,643 prostate cancer cases and 603 prostate-cancer deaths
Intervention	No intervention; dietary spermidine estimated by food-frequency questionnaire
Duration
Endpoints	Prostate cancer incidence; All-cause mortality; Prostate cancer-specific mortality

What the study showed, in plain terms

In a large PLCO cohort, dietary spermidine intake was not associated with prostate cancer incidence or prostate cancer-specific mortality.

Key findings

The highest-versus-lowest intake comparison was essentially null for incidence and was not statistically significant for prostate-cancer mortality. This is useful human cancer-context evidence, but it neither proves supplement safety during cancer treatment nor supports an anti-cancer claim.

What this study can and cannot tell us

Observational dietary study, residual confounding, FFQ exposure estimation and inability to reliably adjust total energy intake in the processed analytic dataset. No isolated spermidine supplement was tested.

Editorial review

Reviewed by the Biohack Blueprint research team

Khaled Mahmoud