THURSDAY, Nov. 29 (HealthDay News) -- In men with prostate cancer, two structural proteins involved in the relationship between hormones and prostate cancer progression are over-produced in the tumors of blacks, suggesting that there may be a genetic basis for the increased prostate cancer incidence and mortality in black men, according to research presented at the American Association for Cancer Research conference on The Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved, held this week in Atlanta.
Asim B. Abdel-Mageed, Ph.D., of the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, and colleagues used DNA sequencing and screening techniques to compare prostate cancer cells from 50 black and white men who were matched according to tumor grades.
The researchers found that heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein H1 (hnRNP-H1) and scaffold attachment factor B2 (SAFB-2) were over-produced in 90 percent of the black subjects' tumor cells -- a trend they did not observe among white subjects.
"The target genes may have potential clinical utility as biomarkers or prognostic indicators of disease progression in African-American men independent of a prostate-specific antigen screen," Abdel-Mageed said in a statement.
Abstract B-99
