Biomarkers for aggressive prostate cancer

摘要

Although aggressive forms of prostate cancer kill more than 27,000 men in the United States each year, researchers have faced difficulty in devising a prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-based screening test to distinguish between more and less aggressive cancers. Jianfeng Xu et al. (pp. 2136-2140) compared DNA sequences from patients with varying levels of aggressive prostate cancer to identify genetic differences between the groups. The authors analyzed nearly 27,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) across the genome from genetic databases from prostate cancer patients. Patients with a certain form of a SNP on the short arm of chromosome 17 were approximately 25% more likely to have aggressive prostate cancer than those with another form, the authors report.