(New York City)Scientists have identified a common genetic marker that signals a 60 percent heightened risk of prostate cancer in men who carry it, and it may help explain why black men are unusually prone to the disease, a new study says.
The DNA variant may play a role in about 8 percent of prostate cancers in men of European extraction and 16 percent of the cancers in blacks, researchers said.
The study was published online Sunday by Nature Genetics and will appear in the journal’s June issue. The work is reported by Kari Stefansson and colleagues at deCode genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland, and scientists elsewhere.
The variant is about twice as common in blacks as whites, so that may contribute to the higher incidence of prostate cancer in blacks, the researchers said.
Stefansson said in a statement that deCode plans to use the discovery to develop a genetic test that might help doctors decide how closely to follow men at high risk and how to treat prostate cancer cases. The study indicated the variant might be associated with more aggressive forms of the disease.
It’s not clear whether the heightened risk comes from the variant itself or from another that lies nearby on chromosome 8.
In general, men run a 1-in-6 chance of developing prostate cancer at some point in their lives. The risk is greater for those who are older, black or have a brother or father who’s had the disease. More than 230,000 new cases are expected this year in the United States, with about 27,000 deaths.
The researchers found that the DNA variant was more common in prostate cancer patients than in the general population, suggesting an association with the disease. They compared a total of 3,430 patients with more than 2,000 others, drawing on study populations in Iceland, Sweden, Illinois and Michigan.
Among whites, the variant appeared in about 19 percent of patients and 13 percent of the other participants. Among blacks, both numbers were about twice as high.

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(Warsaw) About 2,000 gays and their supporters marched through central Warsaw on Saturday in the first legally sanctioned Pride parade in the Polish capital.
The marchers were guarded by almost as many police with more than a thousand skinheads and ultra-nationalists lining the route throwing eggs and bottles.
The heavy police cordon prevented the mob from rushing the marchers and police reported few arrests.
At the head of the parade in a show of solidarity with Polish LGBT leaders was Claudia Roth, the leader of Germany’s Green Party.
The city earlier this month gave its official approval for the parade. In 2004 and 2003 then Warsaw mayor Lech Kaczynski refused to grant permission for a gay pride parade in the capital. Nevertheless, more than 2,500 people ignored the order and marched anyway.
Kaczynski is now president of Poland. Gay rights groups say they’ve suffered even more of a setback since the election victory last fall of his conservative Law and Justice party which regularly denounces homosexuality. A new coalition formed last month has also raised concerns because it includes a right-wing party, League of Polish Families.
Wojciech Wierzejski, a leading member of the LPF, in a letter to Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro and Interior Minister Ludwik Dorn called for a criminal investigation into the “illegal sources of financing” of Polish gay groups.
Gays are under attack in most former Soviet states. Last month police broke up a Pride march in Moscow.

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