Men may soon have a new way to help determine their risk for prostate cancer. Using a medical database of almost 17,000 men with prostate cancer, researchers created a model that calculated a man’s risk by focusing on family history of prostate cancer and genetic variants, specifically the genes BRCA2, HOXB13, and BRCA1, which are associated with a higher risk of prostate cancer.
The risk model was applied to a database of 170,000 men without prostate cancer. About 7,600 of these men developed cancer over a 10-year period. The researchers found that the majority of the prostate cancer patients could have been identified as moderate to high risk prior to their diagnosis.
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