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Prostate/Breast Cancer Link Seen in Blacks

Posted on: Friday, 1 December 2006, 18:00 CST

Black men with prostate cancer are more likely to have a family history of prostate and breast cancer than whites, say Michigan researchers.

Researchers Jennifer Beebe-Dimmer and Kathleen Cooney at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center in Ann Arbor reviewed the records of the Flint Men's Health Study, a population-based study of African-American men ages 40 to 79 who live in Flint.

Since African-American men are 60 percent more likely to develop prostate cancer than Caucasian men, the team focused on family history in order to identify people who needed more aggressive prostate-cancer screening.

The subjects were 121 men diagnosed with prostate cancer and 179 healthy controls who completed a survey on their family history of prostate and breast cancer.

The researchers found that men with prostate cancer were almost five times more likely to have a brother with prostate cancer and about four times more likely to have a sister with breast cancer than healthy men, and their sisters had a higher incidence of premenopausal breast cancer than the general population.

This was the first study to find a link between breast cancer and prostate cancer in African-Americans, the researchers said.

Collecting a family history of prostate and breast cancer, especially among siblings, could be a key component of assessing prostate cancer risk among African-American men, Cooney said. She also thought the findings might help scientists identify new genes associated with both prostate and breast cancer in the future.

Source: United Press International

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