• Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, 655 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA. slindstr@hsph.harvard.edu

BACKGROUND: A recent genome-wide association study (GWAS) of prostate cancer in a Japanese population identified five novel regions not previously discovered in other ethnicities. In this study, we attempt to replicate these five loci in a series of nested prostate cancer case-control studies of European ancestry.

METHODS: We genotyped five single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP): rs13385191 (chromosome 2p24), rs12653946 (5p15), rs1983891 (6p21), rs339331 (6p22), and rs9600079 (13q22), in 7,956 prostate cancer cases and 8,148 controls from a series of nested case-control studies within the National cancer Institute Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium (BPC3). We tested each SNP for association with prostate cancer risk and assessed whether associations differed with respect to disease severity and age of onset.

RESULTS: Four SNPs (rs13385191, rs12653946, rs1983891, and rs339331) were significantly associated with prostate cancer risk (P values ranging from 0.01 to 1.1 × 10(-5)). Allele frequencies and ORs were overall lower in our population of European descent than in the discovery Asian population. SNP rs13385191 (C2orf43) was only associated with low-stage disease (P = 0.009, case-only test). No other SNP showed association with disease severity or age of onset. We did not replicate the 13q22 SNP, rs9600079 (P = 0.62).

CONCLUSIONS: Four SNPs associated with prostate cancer risk in an Asian population are also associated with prostate cancer risk in men of European descent.

IMPACT: This study illustrates the importance of evaluation of prostate cancer risk markers across ethnic groups.