Cookie Settings

We use cookies to optimize our website. These include cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site, as well as those that are only used for anonymous statistic. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Further information can be found in our data privacy protection .

Essential

These cookies are necessary to run the core functionalities of this website and cannot be disabled.

Name Webedition CMS
Purpose This cookie is required by the CMS (Content Management System) Webedition for the system to function correctly. Typically, this cookie is deleted when the browser is closed.
Name econda
Purpose Session cookie emos_jcsid for the web analysis software econda. This runs in the “anonymized measurement” mode. There is no personal reference. As soon as the user leaves the site, tracking is ended and all data in the browser are automatically deleted.
Statistics

These cookies help us understand how visitors interact with our website by collecting and analyzing information anonymously. Depending on the tool, one or more cookies are set by the provider.

Name econda
Purpose Statistics
External media

Content from external media platforms is blocked by default. If cookies from external media are accepted, access to this content no longer requires manual consent.

Name YouTube
Purpose Show YouTube content
Name Twitter
Purpose activate Twitter Feeds

Prostate Cancer: Risk Increases With The Number of Affected Family Members

No. 18 | 23/04/2010 | by (Koh)

The risk of getting prostate cancer increases with the number of directly related family members who are affected by the disease. Scientists of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) in Heidelberg have now calculated the age-specific individual risks in the largest study ever made on familial prostate cancer.

© dkfz.de

For a long time now doctors have known that prostate cancer “runs in the family”. Men with family members who have been diagnosed with the disease have an elevated risk of developing cancer of the prostate. But exactly how high is an individual person’s risk? For whom and at what age should an early detection screening urgently be recommended?

Researchers of the department headed by Kari Hemminki at DKFZ have analyzed these questions in the largest study ever published on familial prostate cancer. The study included 26,651 prostate cancer patients, 5,623 of whom came from families in which the disease had been diagnosed before.

The more of a man’s direct relatives, i.e. brothers and fathers, are affected, the higher is his personal risk to develop prostate cancer himself. Thus, the researchers calculated that men up to an age of 65 years with three affected brothers have a risk that is 23 times higher than that of the control group (men without affected family members). Men aged between 65 and 74 years, whose father was or is the only one affected, have a risk that is increased by 1.8 times and, thus, the lowest risk elevation in the familial cancer group. The DKFZ researchers recognized a general tendency that the personal risk is the higher, the younger affected relatives were at the time of diagnosis.

Elevated familial cancer risks are often doubted. Critics argue that results tend to be distorted because relatives of affected persons are alarmed and have early detection exams more often than the rest of the population. For this reason, the argument runs, they are more frequently overdiagnosed, because even tumors are found that might never have caused any symptoms during their lifetime. In order to refute this criticism, the DKFZ researchers also investigated the prostate cancer mortality in relation to the number of affected family members. They arrived at the same risk distribution as for newly diagnosed cases: The more direct relatives are affected, the higher is a person’s risk of dying from prostate cancer. Thus, the scientists have proved that the risk increase is real and not just due to more frequent early detection examinations.

“Our results provide a good guidance for doctors. If a man has several affected relatives who may even have been diagnosed at a young age, then his personal risk is substantially increased. In this case, a family doctor should urgently recommend having an early detection examination,” said study head Kari Hemminki.

The study is based on data of the Swedish National Family Cancer Database which contains data on 11.8 million individuals and every single one of over one million cancer cases that occurred between the years of 1958 and 2006. Since the cancer database is linked with a multiple-generation register, it is possible to track cancer cases among parents and siblings of patients.

Andreas Brandt, Justo Lorenzo Bermejo, Jan Sundquist and Kari Hemminki: Age-Specific Risk of Incident Prostate Cancer and Risk of Death from Prostate Cancer Defined by the Number of Affected Family Members. European Urology 2010,
DOI: 10.1016/j.eururo.2010.02.002

With more than 3,000 employees, the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) is Germany’s largest biomedical research institute. DKFZ scientists identify cancer risk factors, investigate how cancer progresses and develop new cancer prevention strategies. They are also developing new methods to diagnose tumors more precisely and treat cancer patients more successfully. The DKFZ's Cancer Information Service (KID) provides patients, interested citizens and experts with individual answers to questions relating to cancer.

To transfer promising approaches from cancer research to the clinic and thus improve the prognosis of cancer patients, the DKFZ cooperates with excellent research institutions and university hospitals throughout Germany:

  • National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT, 6 sites)
  • German Cancer Consortium (DKTK, 8 sites)
  • Hopp Children's Cancer Center (KiTZ) Heidelberg
  • Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology (HI-TRON Mainz) - A Helmholtz Institute of the DKFZ
  • DKFZ-Hector Cancer Institute at the University Medical Center Mannheim
  • National Cancer Prevention Center (jointly with German Cancer Aid)
The DKFZ is 90 percent financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and 10 percent by the state of Baden-Württemberg. The DKFZ is a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers.

RSS-Feed

Subscribe to our RSS-Feed.

to top
powered by webEdition CMS