Historical determinants of contemporary attributes of African descendants in the Americas: The androgen receptor holds the key
Introduction
The clustering of seemingly disparate phenomena such as sprinting prowess and prostate cancer among persons of African descent from the Caribbean and the USA while there is no clustering of such phenomena in Africans born and residing in Africa is intriguing and deserving of academic investigation and analysis. The 10 all-time fastest men in the world over 100 m and 9 all-time fastest women, based on the International Association of Athletics Federations’ statistics, are from the Caribbean and the USA [1]. African-Americans have the highest incidence of prostate cancer in the world while the Caribbean has the highest prostate cancer mortality [2]. It is known that athletic sprinting performance is enhanced by the illicit use of anabolic steroids [3] and that treatment – naïve prostate cancer is an androgen dependent tumour which thrives in the presence of testosterone and involutes when testosterone is withdrawn or inhibited [4]. It appears then that descendants of West African slaves who survived the middle passage could have naturally higher androgenic effects in part accounting for the raw athletic talent and high prostate cancer rates seen in African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean peoples. The hypothesis offered seeks to explain how this may have arisen.
Section snippets
Background
This hypothesis emerged from an exploration of the possible interplay between historical events and biological mechanisms resulting in the similarity in the disproportionate racial and geographic distributions in seemingly unrelated phenomena such as sprinting ability and prostate cancer. The hypothesis is equally a synthesis of the interpretations of observations of a disparate nature such as the high incidence and mortality rates of prostate cancer amongst men of African descent in the
Conclusion
I submit that a population shift resulting in increased responsiveness of the androgen receptor in descendants of West-African slaves who survived the middle passage has occurred and is interacting with local environmental and sociocultural factors in the Caribbean and North America to produce the high prostate cancer incidence and mortality as well as the outstanding athletic sprinting ability witnessed in Afro-Caribbean people and African-Americans. This hypothesis is not only biologically
Conflict of interest statement
There is no conflict of interest.
Grant support
There are no grants supporting this work.
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