Scientists have discovered the first gene linked to the aggressive form of prostate cancer, raising hope that doctors will someday be able to predict how the disease will progress.
The cancer is often either slow-growing or aggressive, which has led the two types of the disease to be dubbed the ‘tiger’ and the ‘pussycat’.
The difference can be crucial as many prostate cancer treatments carry with them the risk of serious side-effects, including incontinence and impotence.
However, at the moment there is no way to predict which type a patient will suffer.
Although carrying the newly identified gene does not in itself guarantee that a patients’ cancer will be aggressive, the breakthrough raises hopes that doctors could someday discover a number of genes that would allow them to predict the diseases’ progress accurately.
Dr Jianfeng Xu, from Wake Forest University, in North Carolina, who led the study, said: "This finding addresses one of the most important clinical questions of prostate cancer – the ability at an early stage to distinguish between aggressive and slow-growing disease.
"Although the genetic marker currently has limited clinical utility, we believe it has the potential to one day be used in combination with other genetic markers to predict which men have aggressive prostate cancer at a stage when the disease is still curable."
If identified, men who carry the genes could be encouraged to attend screening at a young age, he and his team believe.
More than 35,000 men a year in Britain develop prostate cancer and around one in three go on to die from the disease.
However, many men have such a slow growing form of the disease that they will in all likelihood die from something else before they ever suffer symptoms of their cancer, posing a treatment dilemma for doctors.
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), looked at the genetic make-up of 4,849 men with an aggressive form of prostate cancer and 12,205 with a slow-growing form of the disease.
Researchers discovered a genetic defect which makes carriers up to 25 per cent more likely to develop the aggressive form.
Dr Helen Rippon, from The Prostate Cancer Charity, said: “Distinguishing between aggressive and slow growing forms of prostate cancer is probably the most significant challenge facing research into the disease today.
“However, this marker is not informative enough on its own to form the basis of a new, more reliable test – up to 30 per cent of men with a less aggressive cancer also carry it.
“Nevertheless, this study raises hopes that a panel of several genetic markers might one day be established that together can determine a man’s risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer.”
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
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