Principal Investigator

• Hoda Anton-Culver, PhD
  University of California, Irvine

Participating Institutions

• Duke University
• Emory University
• Georgetown University
• Johns Hopkins University
• University of California - Irvine
• University of North Carolina
• University of Pennsylvania

Synopsis

It is estimated that one person in 170 may carry high-risk alleles of the prostate cancer gene and that carriers of this gene have a lifetime risk of disease of 88% and noncarriers a lifetime risk of 5%. These estimates are tentative but they suggest that the prostate cancer gene may be a fairly common gene that may be involved in a fairly high proportion of early onset prostate cancer cases. It is, therefore, very important to identify the gene, understand how it functions and identify what other exposures (genetic and/or environmental) interact with this gene. Also, we believe it is helpful to take a population-based approach to estimate the gene frequency, penetrance, and attributable fraction for prostate cancer.

The goals of this study are:

• To further characterize, document, and obtain biological specimens of population-based series of individuals with early onset (age * 65) prostate cancer cases and their family members, as well as series of high-risk families.
• Expand familial cases and high-risk families, including verification of cancer and collection of blood specimens from available, informative relatives of these families to explore possible genetic predisposition to prostate cancer.

View the protocol summary report.