New Study Shows Viability of Using Ancestry to Compare Prostate Cancer Risk Across Populations
Ancestry has been shown to be a risk factor for prostate cancer. Unfortunately, we know very little about why men of certain races and ethnicities are more prone to get it, let alone how to use genetic information about ancestry to stratify risk across different populations. But according to a new report, a genetic risk score based on a multi-ancestry meta-analysis can stratify men by their risk of developing prostate cancer. The Diagnostic Challenge Black men in the U.S., and other men of African ancestry, are diagnosed with prostate cancer more than men of other races. By the same token, prostate cancer occurs less often in Asian-American and Hispanic/Latino men than in non-Hispanic whites. Ancestry affects not just susceptibility but the age a man is likely to get prostate cancer and whether he is likely to die from it. However, the reasons for these ancestry-based variants remains a mystery. New Genetic Clues Genome analysis may hold the key to unraveling this mystery. There are currently a total of 183 known genetic risk variants for prostate cancer. On Jan. 4, Nature Genetics reported that an international team of researchers had uncovered 86 more. According to the report, the team did this […]
Populations | Cases | Controls |
European | 85,554 | 91,972 |
African | 10,368 | 10,986 |
East Asian | 8,611 | 18,809 |
Hispanic | 2,714 | 5,239 |
- Men of European ancestry had five times the risk of developing prostate cancer;
- Men of African ancestry had nearly four times the risk;
- Men of East Asian ancestry had nearly 4.5 times the risk; and
- Hispanic men had about four times the risk.
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