Scientists at Britain's Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) said their findings showed prostate cancer patients should be tested for specific genetic factors before doctors decide how aggressively to treat their tumors.
Dr. Alison Reid, who led the study, said it showed that patients with none of three specific genetic changes had good prospects, with 85.5% still alive after 11 years.
But those who had the all three gene abnormalities had a much worse prognosis, with only 13.7% still alive after 11 years.
Helen Rippon of the Prostate Cancer Charity said the study would help answer one of the most important questions in prostate cancer research -- "how to distinguish early, and with confidence, the potentially life threatening prostate tumors from the slow-growing form of the disease".
The ICR team employed fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) to analyze prostate tumor samples from 308 patients and look for three genetic changes -- loss of the PTEN gene and rearrangement of the ERG or ETV1 genes.
Previous studies have shown that deletions of the PTEN gene and ERG gene mutations are common in prostate cancer, but the combined impact of these on survival in a large group of patients had not been looked at previously.
Dr. Reid said around 6% of patients in the study had lost the PTEN gene and did not have either an ERG or ETV1 gene rearrangement.
In a paper published online January 26 in the British Journal of Cancer, she and her colleagues report: "The presence of PTEN gene loss in the absence of ERG/ETV1 gene rearrangements identified a patient population...with poorer cancer-specific survival that was highly significant (hazard ratio, 4.87; p <>
"Men diagnosed with prostate cancer could be tested for all three genetic alterations, and this information could be used to help determine how aggressively they should be treated," the researchers added.
Br J Cancer 2010.
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