What’s your sexual partner count? Well, if you’ve performed oral on more than 5 women, we have some bad news…
According to new research, men who have gone down on 5 or more women are at far greater risk of cancer than sexually active women.
Interestingly, throat cancer wasn’t the only form of the disease in men. Studies by John Hopkins found that men were also exposed to head and neck cancer, linked to the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV).
The reports, published in leading cancer journal, Annals of Oncology, indicated that preventative measures were necessary with suggestions that oral cancer will overtake cervical cancer in the US by 2020.
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“For these reasons, it would be useful to be able to identify healthy people who are most at risk of developing oropharyngeal cancer in order to inform potential screening strategies, if effective screening tests could be developed,” says Dr Amber D’Souza, leading author of the report and associate professor at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“Most people perform oral sex in their lives, and we found that oral infection with cancer-causing HPV was rare among women regardless of how many oral sex partners they had, ” she continued. “Among men who did not smoke, cancer-causing oral HPV was rare among everyone who had less than five oral sex partners, although the chances of having oral HPV infection did increase with the number of oral sexual partner and smoking.
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The research tested over 13,000 people between the ages of 20 and 69 for HPV. The reports concluded that women had a low risk of oral HPV from oral sex, regardless of their number.
However, in men, the likelihood of cancer increased in those who were smokers and further increased by 7.1 per cent in those who had performed oral on two to four sexual partners. More than five sexual partners? Non-smokers had a 7.4 per cent of oral cancer while smokers increased to a whopping 15 per cent.
There you have it: While it’s widely assumed that oral sex is an alternative to unprotected sex when you don’t have a condom, there are still risks involved in performing the act.
Make sure you’re always well protected – check out the 15 ways you’re using condoms wrong.
