Genetic Testing will optimise treatment of advanced prostate cancer

[Paul Edwards]

"A new study reported today in the New England Journal of Medicine is suggesting that every man with metastatic prostate cancer (regardless of his age or family history) should be tested for certain particular inherited mutations.

The mutations in question are the ones that affect a man’s capacity for DNA repair, e.g., BRCA2, ATM, CHEK2, BRCA1, RAD51D, and PALB2.................

 

Detailed genetic and similar testing of men with advanced forms of prostate cancer [may] be able to optimize the quality of their treatment and their likely outcomes. Such testing may also help us to avoid the unnecessary, inappropriate, and expensive treatment of men with types of therapy that are highly unlikely to work for them as individuals.

 

It will undoubtedly take some time before all this becomes “standard practice” outside the major academic medical centers, but it is also clear that any patient with an advanced form of prostate cancer (M0 or M1 disease, or castration-resistant disease — whether metastatic or not) should be asking his doctors whether such testing is appropriate in his particular case."

 

Click on this link to read the New Prostate Cancer Infolink's take on this research. The link mentioned in the article to a blog post by the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is also worth reading.