Science and technology UK (Commonwealth Union) – Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers for men. The condition is generally more common among men over 65 years old. A variety of different research has indicated that in addition to age certain other factors may also increase the risk of Prostate cancer, which include having a male member of the family who has previously had the disease and diet, where food such as red meat and dairy products may also increase the risk.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge have formed a complete tool that can forecast a person’s risk of developing prostate cancer, which they indicate may assist in ensuring that those men at greatest risk will access the appropriate testing while lowering unnecessary and potentially invasive testing for individuals at lower risk.
The CanRisk-Prostate, was produced by scientists at the University of Cambridge and The Institute of Cancer Research, London, is set to be incorporated into the group’s CanRisk web tool, that has currently recorded roughly 1.2 million risk predictions. The free tool is presently available to healthcare professionals across the world to assist in predicting the risks for breast and ovarian cancers.
Prostate cancer testing usually has a blood test that seeks out the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) protein that is specific to the prostate gland; but its accuracy can be unreliable. According to the NHS website, roughly 3 in 4 men with a raised PSA level do not have cancer and more tests, like tissue biopsies or MRI (Magnetic resonance imaging) scans, are needed to verify the diagnosis.
Professor Antonis Antoniou of the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge says “Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK, but population-wide screening based on PSA isn’t an option: these tests are often falsely positive, which means that many men would then be biopsied unnecessarily. Also, many prostate tumours identified by PSA tests are slow-growing and would not have been life-threatening. The treatment of these tumours may do more harm than good.”
“What we need is a way of identifying those men who are at greatest risk, allowing us to target screening and diagnostic tests where they are most needed, while also reducing the harms for those men who have low risk of the disease. This is what CanRisk-Prostate aims to do. For the first time, it combines information on the genetic makeup and prostate cancer family history, the main risk factors for the disease, to provide personalised cancer risks.”
Prostate cancer is frequently a genetically determined common cancer. Inherited faulty versions of the BRCA2, HOXB13 and possibly BRCA1 genes are linked to moderate-to-high risk of prostate cancer, however these faults are infrequent among the population. There are also several hundred more common genetic variants where everyone confers a lower risk, but in combination they act like ‘volume control’ that moderate or elevate the risk of prostate cancer.
Around 16% of men will get prostate cancer by the time they are at the age of 85. Applying the model, the researchers discovered that the predicted risk was increased for men who had a father who had prostate cancer. There was a 27% chance if the father was diagnosed at an older age, around 80 years old but as high as a 42% chance if the father was diagnosed earlier of 50 years old.
The risks were considerably increased for males with genetic faults. An example would be, 54% of men who carry an alteration in the BRCA2 gene will get prostate cancer, but among men with BRCA2 gene faults, the risks were substantially reduced if they also had a lesser number of the low-risk variants, but it significantly increases if they also had a bigger number of the low-risk variants.
