Carpe testes.
Hey, gang. Serious question: How are your balls doing?
Feeling a little tender? Heavy? Got a surprise triplet down there? What you're feeling could be a symptom of testicular cancer.* Check in with your doctor and see if a testicular self-check regimen would be a good thing you.
*Spoiler: It probably isn't, but better safe than sorry!
BuzzFeed Life spoke to Dr. James McKiernan, urologist-in-chief at New York–Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, and Dr. Brad Leibovich, the chair of urology at the Mayo Clinic, to figure out the whys and hows of carpe-ing your testes.
Men in their twenties and early thirties — aka men who least expect it — are more likely to get testicular cancer than men of other age groups.
"Young healthy men don't usually get cancer," says McKiernan, "but if they're going to, the number-one cancer they get is testicular cancer." In the U.S., 5 out of 100,000 men are diagnosed with it, says Leibovich, most often in their twenties and early thirties. There's also a second window of frequency in your fifties, but most diagnoses are made in the younger years.
More specifically, white men tend to be diagnosed more often.
According to McKiernan, certain ethnic groups are more predisposed to testicular cancer. "Most cancers in the U.S. are actually more common in African-Americans than in caucasians," he says. "But testicular cancer is dramatically more common in caucasians, by about tenfold, than in African-Americans."
It's also a matter of national population. For whatever reason, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden see really high rates of testicular cancer diagnoses. "No one's sure why," says McKiernan. "Maybe it's genetics, maybe it's environmental, maybe it's a little bit of both."