Men with prostate cancer and an inherited gene mutation have the worst form of the disease, a research reveals, according to BBC News.
The BRCA2 gene is linked to hereditary breast cancer, as well as prostate and ovarian cancer.
Now scientists say that as well as being more likely to get prostate cancer, men with BRCA2 are also more likely to develop aggressive tumors and have the poorest survival rates. They say these men should be treated quickly to save lives.
Around one in every 100 men with prostate cancer will have the BRCA2 mutation. These men might benefit from immediate surgery or radiotherapy, even if their disease is at an early stage and would normally be classified as low risk, according to the latest work in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Prostate cancer can grow extremely slowly or very quickly, and this is something that is hard to predict early on.
Some men may live symptom-free for a lifetime, despite having this cancer. For many, treatment is not immediately necessary. But researchers say men with BRCA2 and prostate cancer should be treated early and aggressively because their tumor is more likely to spread.
Prof Ros Eeles and colleagues at The Institute of Cancer Research in London and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust found prostate cancers spread more quickly and were more often fatal in men who had inherited a faulty BRCA2 gene than in men without the faulty gene.
They looked at the medical records of prostate cancer patients which included 61 men with BRCA2, 18 men with a similar gene mutation called BRCA1, and 1,940 men with neither mutations.
Patients with BRCA2-mutations were significantly less likely to survive their cancer, living an average of 6.5 years after diagnosis compared with 12.9 years for non-carriers. They were also more likely to have advanced disease at the time of diagnosis.
More than 40,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer every year.
