The genetics of prostate cancer risk
July 3rd, 2010 Posted in UncategorizedAccording to an article in today’s (29 June) Wall Street Journal, scientists may soon be able to answer the agonizing question facing men with prostate cancer whether a specific individual actually needs early and aggressive treatment for his cancer or can simply monitor it for risk of progression.
That means we are close to the development of genetic profiling methods that will allow a urologist to test for specific genes and to “classify” a newly diagnosed prostate cancer patient as being at greater or lesser risk for clinically significant disease over time based on these tests.
One of the things clearly shown by a last year research was that most (but not all) cases of lethal prostate cancer can be tracked back, over time, to a specific group of prostate cancer cells in the prostate at the time of diagnosis that come with a particular genetic makeup. In simple words, the genetic profile of a specific prostate cancer may be critical to its ability to metastasize and become a lethal form of prostate cancer — but it may not be the only factor. The other thing showed in this research was that the initial DNA mutations among the patients with lethal disease were all different!