Promising discovery in prostate cancer: Risk can be determined 15 years in advance

Proteins found in men's blood may provide clues to prostate cancer risk years before diagnosis.

Oxford University researchers have found that certain proteins found in men's blood can signal a higher risk of prostate cancer more than 15 years before they are diagnosed.

“Finding proteins linked to known genes that trigger prostate cancer in blood collected years before diagnosis provides new insights into the earliest stages of the disease,” said the study's corresponding author, Karl Smith-Byrne, from the University of Oxford.

Prostate cancer is the most common type of cancer among men in the European Union and is second only to lung cancer worldwide. In the EU alone, approximately 330,000 new cases are diagnosed every year and approximately 75,000 men die annually from this disease.

Researchers from Oxford University analyzed blood samples from more than 2,500 men collected between 1992 and 2000. They compared baseline samples from 982 men who developed prostate cancer with samples from 1,573 men who did not develop the disease.

The team measured more than 6,000 different proteins in each participant's blood plasma. Because the samples were taken years before any diagnosis was made, sometimes more than 15 years ago, researchers were able to look for early chemical warning signs, such as changes in proteins.

While some proteins have been linked to an increased overall risk for prostate cancer, others have been linked specifically to aggressive or fast-growing forms of the disease. On the other hand, according to the study, men with high levels of some immune system proteins such as GZMK and ANXA2 had a lower risk of developing prostate cancer in the long term. The findings were published in the journal European Urology.

“Many prostate cancers grow slowly and may never cause harm; others are aggressive and can be life-threatening,” said the study's first author, Zhe Huang, a postdoctoral epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health.

“Ultimately, we hope this will help us understand the biology of aggressive prostate cancer and identify markers that may improve the way we assess risk in the future,” Huang said.

The researchers emphasized that the findings are not yet ready to be used as a screening test and need further validation.