Boston, MA -- Harvard Medical School researchers have identified a DNA segment on chromosome 8 that is a major risk factor for prostate cancer, especially in African American men. The paper appears in the August 21 electronic edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (also see PNAS's news tip below).
"This paper identifies a genetic risk factor that about doubles the likelihood of prostate cancer in younger African American men," says principal investigator David Reich, PhD, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of genetics with the HMS Department of Genetics and the Broad Institute. "This finding may explain why younger African Americans have an increased risk for prostate cancer than do other populations--and may also explain why this increased risk in African Americans attenuates with older age."
"This is one of the first genetic risk factors found that is responsible for an appreciable fraction of sporadic prostate cancer cases, particularly for the African American population," says lead author Matthew Freedman, Harvard Medical School instructor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute "Interestingly, we found that this region also confers risk for prostate cancer for diverse ethnic groups. The actual gene, however, remains to be identified."
The researchers used their newly developed method of "admixture mapping" to screen through the genome in African Americans (who have both African and European ancestry), searching for the segments where individuals with disease have more of one ancestry than the average. The key epidemiological fact is that prostate cancer occurs approximately 1.6-fold times more often in African Americans than in other populations. This prompted the hypothesis that there is a genetic risk factor for prostate cancer that occurs at higher frequency in African than in other populations, and that can be found by searching for a region where the pro
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Contact: John Lacey
public_affairs@hms.harvard.edu
617-432-0442
Harvard Medical School
21-Aug-2006