Link between breast and prostate cancer found
May 19th, 2008 Posted in prostate cancer, prostate cancer risksA research funded by Australia’s National Breast Cancer Foundation and carried out by researchers at kConFab, an Australian and New Zealand consortium for research into familial breast cancer, said that men from families where the women have high rates of breast cancer could face a heightened risk of prostate cancer.
Those families carried a mutation in the BRCA2 gene, which is passed from generation to generation. Researchers discovered that a man with a genetic fault in BRCA2 has almost four times the risk of developing prostate cancer than men in the general population. The BRCA2-prostate cancers that arise in these men also tend to be more aggressive.
The results of the research were published this week in the US journal Clinical Cancer Research and trials were now being undertaken to try to find early detection biomarkers for men who carry the faulty genes.
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