A genetic analysis indicates the probability of dying from prostate cancer.

Do you want to know your risk of dying from prostate cancer? The answer, according to a study published in ‘Nature Communications’, can be given by a simple genetic analysis. A team of Japanese researchers from the Riken Center assures that it is enough to analyze a small portion of a person’s genome to estimate the probability that they will die from prostate cancer, even before suffering from the cancer. Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men worldwide. It also has the highest heritability among all common non-skin cancers, indicating that a man’s genetics play an important role in whether he will get the cancer. That makes it an ideal candidate for genetic studies. Related News standard No A system fattens tumor cells to diagnose cancer early R. Ibarra This approach could significantly improve liquid biopsies, used to detect mutations in cancer patients, by increasing the amount of signal available in blood samples In many studies It is difficult to discover cause and effect. “The standard approach involves comparing samples taken from patients and healthy people,” explains Chikashi Terao. “But since samples are obtained from patients after the disease develops, any differences between proteins or genes could be due to the presence of the disease.” This is where genetic studies of inherited genetic variants become important. “If we discover differences in the variants between people with prostate cancer and healthy people, they must be the causes, not the consequences, because these inherited variants must be different between the two groups even before developing the disease,” explains Terao. The results will help identify people at high risk early in life. In this work, the power of genetic studies has been applied to prostate cancer in a study that includes data from 300,000 people. The team focused on sites that bind the male hormone androgen, as a preliminary analysis revealed that variants of those sites played a dominant role in prostate cancer. They also assessed the risk of dying from prostate cancer rather than the risk of getting the disease. The results obtained indicated that the polygenic risk score developed in the study can be used to predict the future risk of dying from prostate cancer. Furthermore, they showed that androgen receptor binding regions of normal prostate cells are particularly effective in predicting this. Unlike many previous studies that focused on people of European origin, the study used data from Japanese, which, Terao notes, makes the “findings generalizable.” The study results will help identify high-risk people early in life, who can then be tested more frequently throughout their lives.