Family history of prostate cancer and prostate cancer risk in the Alpha‐Tocopherol, Beta‐Carotene Cancer Prevention (ATBC) Study

Abstract

Prostate cancer family history has been associated with increased risk of the malignancy. Most prior studies have been retrospective and subject to recall bias, however, and data evaluating interactions with other important risk factors are limited. We examined the relationship between a family history of prostate cancer and prostate cancer risk in relation to body size, micronutrients and other exposures in the Alpha-Tocopherol, Beta-Carotene Cancer Prevention (ATBC) Study cohort of Finnish male smokers. Family history of cancer information was self-reported once during the study in 1991, and anthropometry was measured by trained personnel. Among 19,652 men with complete data, 1,111 incident cases were identified during up to 12.3 years of follow-up. A firstdegree family history of prostate cancer was associated with an overall relative risk (RR) of 1.91 (95% CI 5 1.49-2.47) and a RR of 4.16 (95% CI 5 2.67-6.49) for advanced disease (stage ‡ 3), adjusted for age and trial intervention. Our data also suggest that to some degree, height, body mass index, and serum a-tocopherol and b-carotene modify the family history and prostate cancer association, although the interactions were not statistically significant. Supplementation with vitamin E or b-carotene did not modify the family history-prostate cancer association. This study provides additional evidence that family history is a significant risk factor for prostate cancer. Published 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. This article is a US Government work and, as such, is in the public domain in the United States of America.Key words: family history; prostate cancer; height; weight; atocopherol; retinol; b-carotene Prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death among men in the United States. 1 Although little is known about the underlying causes of prostate cancer, family history of the disease has been consistently associated with increased risk. A recent meta-analysis estimated that a family history of prostate cancer in first-degree relatives was associated with a relative risk of 2.5 [3.5 for risk of early onset (<60 years old) disease]. 2 However, most existing studies are limited to retrospective case-control studies 3-7 and some existing cohort studies are based on family history probands. 8-10 Additionally, 2 prospective studies reported that associations between body mass index and prostate cancer were more pronounced among men with a positive family history, 11,12 but data evaluating interactions with other important prostate cancer risk factors are limited.Family history is an important public health screening tool for identification of high-risk groups, particularly in the post-genomic era with the discovery of inherited causes of many diseases including cancers. 13 Since prostate cancer is a result of complex genetic and environmental interactions, 14 family history can be a personalized genomic tool that captures many of these interactions 13 and is essential to individualized cancer prevention strategies. Thus, a...

Height and risk of prostate cancer in the prostate, lung, colorectal, and ovarian cancer screening trial

“…No other study has reported on the height -prostate cancer relationship according to age. Two studies reported somewhat stronger associations with advanced/aggressive disease in men with a positive family history of prostate cancer (Norrish et al, 2000;Ahn et al, 2008). The limited numbers of aggressive cases with a first-degree family history (n ¼ 109), prevented our examining potential interaction with family history.…”

A Pooled Analysis of 15 Prospective Cohort Studies on the Association between Fruit, Vegetable, and Mature Bean Consumption and Risk of Prostate Cancer

“…Fifteen prospective cohorts (9–22) (Table 1) within this international consortium met the predefined criteria for inclusion: baseline assessment of usual diet, validation of the dietary assessment method used or a closely related instrument, at least one publication on an association between diet and cancer, and identification of at least 50 incident CaP cases during follow-up. Each study received approval from the institutional review board of their institution.…”

“…Incident CaP cases were identified in each study by follow-up questionnaires with subsequent review of medical records (20,21), linkage to cancer registries (12–18,23), or both (9–11,22), with the exception of the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial (PCPT), for which cases were limited to those diagnosed through biopsy performed because of an elevated PSA or suspicious digital rectal exam (“for cause”) per trial protocol (19). Some studies also used mortality registries to identify CaP deaths (10,12,14,15,17,20,22,23).…”

Vitamin B6 Deficiency, Genome Instability and Cancer

“…For example, in a large nested case-control study (included in the ATBC Cancer Prevention Study cohort) a statistically significant inverse dose-response relationship was found between plasma PLP levels and pancreatic cancer risk: the risk of subjects in the highest PLP tertile was half the risk of the subjects in the lowest tertile (OR = 0.48). Several case-control studies have found that high vitamin B6 intake was associated with a decreased risk of gastric adenocarcinomas (Michaud et al, 2002;Ahn et al, 2008;Similä et al, 2009) and oral or pharyngeal cancer (Negri et al, 2000).…”