A Validated Risk Model for Personalized Prostate Cancer Risk

Researchers developed the first validated risk model for discerning personalized prostate cancer (PCa) risks. The findings were reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

“No validated PCa risk model currently exists. We therefore sought to develop a genetic risk model that can provide personalized predicted PCa risks on the basis of known moderate- to high-risk pathogenic variants, low-risk common genetic variants, and explicit cancer family history, and to externally validate the model in an independent prospective cohort,” the investigators said.

In this analysis, a risk model was developed using a kin-cohort comprising individuals from 16,633 PCa families obtained in United Kingdom from 1993 to 2017 from the UK Genetic Prostate Cancer Study. The model was externally validated in a group of 170,850 unaffected men (7,624 incident PCas).

The study found that the model effectively predicted familial risks, that were consistent with those reported in previous observational studies. Specifically, in the validation cohort, the model discriminated well between unaffected men and men with incident PCas within 5 years (C-index, 0.790; 95% CI, 0.783 to 0.797) and 10 years (C-index, 0.772; 95% CI, 0.768 to 0.777).

“To our knowledge, this is the first validated risk model offering personalized PCa risks. The model will assist in counseling men concerned about their risk and can facilitate future risk-stratified population screening approaches,” the researchers concluded.