Mutation May Raise Prostate-cancer Risk In African Americans_3493

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Funding
from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Center for Minority Health
and Health Disparities,You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, the National Cancer Institute, the Department
of Defense, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania supported this research.
“Given its high frequency in
hereditary cases, we believe that this mutation is probably associated
with hereditary prostate cancer in African-American men,” Kittles says.
                        
            
            
            
The findings are published online in the Sept. 9,You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, 2005, issue of the Journal of Medical Genetics.
The
study, by scientists at 13 research centers,You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, found that mutations in a
gene known as EphB2 occurred in 15 percent of African-American men with
a strong family history of prostate cancer. The mutation was found in
only 5 percent of African-American men with no family or personal
history of the disease and in less than 2 percent of European-American
men with no history of the disease.
Mutation May Raise Prostate-cancer Risk In African Americans
            
            
“Next,
we must learn more about how this mutation contributes to cancer, and
we must screen for the mutation in a much larger group of
African-American men with prostate cancer to verify its association
with the disease.”
The findings indicate that the
K1019X mutation is found mainly in African-American men, that it is
particularly prevalent in African-American men with a family history of
prostate cancer, and that it increases the risk of prostate cancer in
these men almost three-fold.
Then,You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, says Kittles, a specialist in
prostate-cancer genetics in African Americans, “perhaps we can begin
using this mutation to help estimate prostate-cancer risk in
African-American men.”
Until now, no
gene mutations have been identified that contribute to hereditary
prostate cancer and prostate-cancer susceptibility specifically in
African-American men.
After
sequencing the gene from each volunteer, the investigators found that
11 of the 72 men (15.3 percent) had a mutation designated K1019X. The
same mutation was found in only 5.2 percent in a control group of 329
healthy African-American men and in only 1.7 percent of 231
European-American control samples.
“These data now
sYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Loginest that mutations in this gene might predispose African-American
men to prostate cancer in a significant way.”
For this study, the researchers isolated the EphB2 gene
from white blood cells taken from 72 African-American men in the AAHPC
with hereditary prostate cancer and examined them for mutations.
The findings are the first to come out of
the African-American Hereditary Prostate Cancer (AAHPC) study network,
a group of 112 African-American families nationally who have
volunteered to help in research to identify genetic risk factors for
prostate cancer. Families in the network have had four or more cases of
prostate cancer in the family.
“This as an exciting extension to
our original findings implicating EphB2 as a prostate-cancer
tumor-suppressor gene,” says principal investigator John D. Carpten, of
the Translational Genomics Research Institute.
Other evidence
sYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Loginesting that EphB2 could be a prostate-cancer susceptibility gene
include its location on chromosome 1. The exact function of the gene is
unknown.
The other centers
participating in the study were the Fox Chase Cancer Center;
Translational Genomics Research Institute; the National Genome Center
at Howard University; The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer
Center; University of California Davis Cancer Center; Midtown Urology
Surgical Center, Atlanta, Georgia; Columbia University Medical Center;
the University of Illinois at Chicago; Medical College of Georgia
School of Nursing; National Human Genome Research Institute; the NIH
Center for Inherited Disease Research; and the Karmanos Cancer
Institute.
“This
is the first gene mutation to be associated with familial prostate
cancer in African-American men,” says first author Rick A. Kittles,
associate professor of molecular virology, immunology and medical
genetics and a researcher with the Human Cancer Genetics program at The
Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James
Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute.
Prostate cancer rates are
extremely high in African-American men. They develop the disease 60
percent more often than do European Americans, and they are almost two
and half times more likely to die of the disease.