It is estimated that in the United States 200,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer each year with approximately 20% to 30% having clinically aggressive prostate cancer. When diagnosed the standard is to consider factors such as Gleason score and tumor stage to assess a man’s prognosis, however there are no biomarkers to identify men at greater risk for developing aggressive prostate cancer. To further our ability to know which men are at higher risks for aggressive prostate cancer some recent research was designed to search for genetic variants associated with the risk of more aggressive disease.
A genome-wide scan was conducted in 202 prostate cancer survivors with a more aggressive phenotype and 100 randomly sampled, age-matched prostate-specific antigen screened negative controls. Analysis of 387,384 autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) was followed by validation testing in an independent set of 527 cases with more aggressive and 595 cases with less aggressive prostate cancer, and 1,167 age-matched co