DNA changes may determine which patients require aggressive cancer treatment
Researchers report that alterations of particular DNA regions factor into the prostate cancer development. Moreover, 2 particular DNA modifications result in a higher prostate cancer mortality rate, according to the new research.
For the study, Jianfeng Xu, MD, DrPH, Director of the Center for Cancer Genomics at the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, and his colleagues at Wake Forest, Brady Urological Institute of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, and Karolinska Institute of Sweden used a method for detecting lost or amplified pieces of DNA in cells from the prostate tumors of 125 patients.
According to study results, alterations in 20 gene regions likely play a role in the development of prostate cancer, and a higher incidence of death from prostate cancer was associated with changes in 7 of the 20 regions.
Furthermore, when compared with patients with similar tumor stages and prostate-specific antigen levels upon diagnosis, patients whose cancer cells had an amplification of the MYC gene and a loss of the PTEN gene had a mortality rate more than 50 times greater.
The study is published early online in Cancer.
Source: Wiley.