Experts said men with advanced prostate cancer could be checked for high-risk family genes because they are fairly common, affect treatment and can be passed on to their children, in a report on British Broadcasting Cor-poration (BBC).
According to the international researchers, more than one in every 10 men with the advanced disease carries a faulty gene, inherited from a parent. One of the genes is BRCA1 already linked to breast and ovarian cancer. The study included nearly 700 patients with aggressive prostate cancer and found that a "significant proportion" of these men were born with mutant DNA.
Men with these genes may benefit from newer drug treatments that exploit the damaged ge-netic code to locate and kill off cancer cells. One in eight men will get prostate cancer in their lifetime, that is, 47,000 men diagnosed with the disease every year iiithe United Kingdom.
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Some prostate tumours are very slow growing and may never cause any symptoms or harm, the study found. Researchers have been looking for ways to recognise which cancers will be more problematic and they believe looking at a person's genes could help. Prof Johann de Bono, from London's Institute of Cancer Research and colleagues used a saliva test to check the DNA of the 692 men with ad-vanced prostate cancer who took part in their study. About 12 percent of the men were found to have inherited DNA mutations that the experts said could be the root cause of their cancer.
Prof de Bono believes identifying patients this way could improve treatment.
"We could offer these men drugs such as PARP inhibitors, which are effective in patients with cer-tain DNA repair mutations and are showing impor-tant anti-tumour activity in ongoing clinical trials:' He said it was too early to recommend screening whole families for the mutations, but that might be sensible in the future.
"As doctors, we all know patients who say their father and grandfather had this cancer. We need to do trials to evaluate this risk. Then we could look at preventive strategies he said.
Source: Daily Sun News
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