Genetic Risk Factors May Tailor Prostate Cancer Screening Approaches

Men with a family history of prostate cancer and African-American men are particularly susceptible to the disease, with a twofold to sevenfold increased risk. Assessing risk in these populations has been difficult.

"There have been years of effort to try to identify genes and genetic mutations associated with prostate cancer as there are for breast cancer," said Veda N. Giri, M.D., director of the Prostate Cancer Risk Assessment Program (PRAP) at Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia. "Prostate cancer is a more genetically complex disease."

"When we compared African-American men in PRAP to the high-risk Caucasian men in PRAP, we did find a difference," she said. "African-American men tended to carry more of these genetic risk markers compared to the Caucasian men. Since African-American men carry more of these particular genetic markers, they may be more informative for prostate cancer risk assessment in African-American men."

The researchers then studied how these markers influence time to prostate cancer diagnosis. "We found a trend that African-American men who carried more of these risk markers tended to develop prostate cancer earlier," Giri said. This finding did not reach statistical significance.

Giri said the take-home message from this study is that genetic markers associated with prostate cancer risk need to be characterized in prospective screening populations in order to determine how to incorporate them into risk assessment for prostate cancer, particularly for men at high-risk for the disease. "These markers may have significant use in personalizing the early detection of prostate cancer in men at high-risk in order to provide tailored recommendations for screening and diagnosis of this disease," said Giri.