Watch Out For Oral Pleasure?

This is going to be bad news for some folks out there, if the studies indeed are accurate. People who have had oral sex with more than six partners are 32 times more likely to get throat cancer than those who haven't:

Heads up - having oral sex with more than six people over a lifetime significantly increases the chance of getting throat cancer, a shocking new study has found.

The risk is much greater to a provider of oral pleasure than to a smoker or drinker, according to the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine yesterday.

Scientists at John Hopkins' Kimmel Cancer Center discovered the link while researching whether human papillomavirus (HPV) causes oropharyngeal cancer, a disease that affects the tonsils, back of the tongue and throat.

In a study of 100 people with the disease, cancer expert Dr. Maura Gillison discovered that those who previously had contracted an HPV infection were 32 times more likely to develop the cancer.

One small problem with the study is the size. It looks at only 100 people who had throad cancer. That's far too small a sample size on which to base policy. However, the findings appear significant enough to study in much further detail.