Word: cancerous
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...Prostate cancer may not be at the top of your list of topics for dinner conversation with Dad. But you might reconsider: About 10% of prostate cancer cases are linked with family history, and evidence for the disease's genetic roots is growing. Researchers have recently identified a series of gene markers that, when present with family history of the disease, increase a patient's risk of prostate cancer more than nine times. Those markers, say researchers, can be detected in a simple saliva or blood sample - good news for a condition whose prognosis is improved by early detection...
...today by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), a team of American and Swedish researchers reported the results of a DNA analysis of over 4,700 Swedish men. The study found that patients whose genes contained four of the five common variants, found to be associated with prostate cancer in 2006 and 2007, had a 400% to 500% increased risk of developing the disease. That risk shot up to over 900% in patients who had the genetic variants and a family history, accounting for nearly half of the prostate cancer cases in the study. "We've never seen this...
...Forest have already spun a private business around the study's results - Proactive Genomics, which, like many similar companies that have sprung up recently, will offer a personal genetic test. This one, however, says Xu, will be the world's first genetic screen for a specific disease. To assess cancer risk, patients and doctors currently rely on physical symptoms, age, race, family history and PSA screens - tests that measure blood levels of prostate-specific antigens, which are produced in high amounts by an unhealthy prostate. Xu says his new genetic test - which would require patients to send in blood...
While Xu's test may help identify at-risk patients more accurately and earlier, what it won't do is tell patients - or doctors - who's at risk for developing aggressive, life-threatening disease. In fact most prostate cancer cases in the United States never become lethal: 99% of men diagnosed with prostate cancer - the vast majority of whom are over 65 - survive at least five years, according to the American Cancer Society, and many die with the disease, not because of it. Still, prostate cancer does kill some 30,000 men a year in U.S. Learning more about genetic...
That research is also already underway. In a study published in the journal Lancet in October, Dr. Henrik Gronberg, another co-author of the NEJM study from the Karolinksa Institute, found an association between family history and aggressiveness in certain kinds of cancer. He found that a woman whose mother died from breast cancer, for instance, was also more likely than other women to develop an aggressive form of the disease. Gronberg says the goal is to establish a specific link between genetic markers, risk, and a cancer's potential invasiveness. "We're reading about genetic factors for these common...