Washington: A genetic mutation could become an indicator of the aggressiveness of prostate cancer, thus contributing to combat the disease in an effective way, reports say.
Investigators of the School of Medicine of the University
of Wake Forest, in North Carolina, evaluated 4,849 cases of
aggressive prostate cancer and 12,205 cases of slow cancer
growth.
As a result, they found that among people with the
genetic mutation, the probabilities of suffering an aggressive
tumor were 26 per cent higher.
The magazine proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences (PNAS) will let people know how its development goes,
from the first stages of the illness, and apply a precocious
and effective treatment to combat the disease.
"In the beginning, it is a test to demonstrate that there
are variants in the genoma influencing in the different types
of prostate cancer", the main author of the study Jianfeng Xu
states.
Although the doctor admits that this discovery can have a
limited clinical usefulness, he hopes the study of other
genetic varieties will contribute to predict the
aggressiveness of the prostate tumour.
PTI