TUESDAY, March 7, 2023 (HealthDay News) — In a study of men of African ancestry, published online March 3 in European Urology, nine novel prostate cancer risk variants have been identified.

Fei Chen, Ph.D., from the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 10 genome-wide association studies including 19,378 cases and 61,620 controls of African ancestry to discover common genetic variants contributing to the risk for prostate cancer.

The researchers identified nine novel susceptibility loci for prostate cancer, seven of which were only found or were more common in men of African ancestry, including a stop-gain variant in the prostate-specific gene anoctamin 7, which was African-specific. Strong associations with prostate cancer risk were conferred by a multiancestry polygenic risk score (PRS) of 278 risk variants in African ancestry studies (odds ratios >3 and >5 for men in the top PRS decile and percentile, respectively). Men in the top PRS decile had a significantly higher risk for aggressive prostate cancer compared with those in the 40 to 60 percent PRS category (odds ratio, 1.23).

“We found that PRS could distinguish African ancestry men’s risk of developing aggressive versus nonaggressive disease. As the first evidence of this association, future studies are warranted to further validate and characterize this relationship,” the authors write. “Risk-stratified screening studies in African ancestry populations are needed to determine the benefits of an earlier and more frequent prostate-specific antigen screening strategy for those at a high genetic risk.”

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