Armed with this new information, clinicians may be able to screen for prostate cancer earlier and treat it sooner, according to study author Christopher Haiman, ScD.
"This is a marker that down the road may be used to identify African-Americans and their family members who are at high risk and would benefit from more precise, targeted, and earlier PSA screening," he said in a press release.
Researchers have known for years that men of African ancestry are 1.8 times more likely to be diagnosed with and 2.2 times more likely to die from prostate cancer than white men. Research has pointed to inherited factors as the reason, but genetic factors to explain the difference have been elusive.
The new study by researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California looked at 9,052 prostate cancers among African American men. What they found was that 23 percent of these men had a specific gene variant, which was strongly associated with a prostate cancer diagnosis at a younger age, more aggressive cancer and men with a family history of prostate cancer.
Source: EurekAlert press release and European Urology
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