New Blood Test Can Flag Up Harmful Mutations Caused By Prostate Cancer Treatments | HuffPost Life

This New Blood Test Could Revolutionise Prostate Cancer Treatment

PA / The Huffington Post

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A new blood test for spotting the stages when a prostate cancer treatment might activate "harmful mutations" has been developed.

The test works by looking for cancer DNA circulating in the blood and revealing when this starts to happen.

It follows the discovery more than a decade ago that steroid drugs given alongside hormone therapy may promote cancer-fuelling tumour mutations.

Scientists carried out complex genetic analysis of biopsies and blood samples from 16 men with advanced prostate cancer.

They confirmed that treatment with anti-inflammatory steroid drugs called glucocorticoids could favour the survival of malignant mutant cells.

In several patients, use of the drugs coincided with the emergence of "androgen receptor" mutations and progression of the cancer to more treatment-resistant forms.

Dr Gerhardt Attard, from the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said: "Our study showed that a steroid treatment given to patients with advanced prostate cancer and often initially very effective, started to activate harmful mutations and coincided with the cancer starting to grow again.

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"In the future, we hope to routinely monitor genetic mutations in patients with advanced disease using just a blood test - enabling us to stop treatments when they become disease drivers and select the next best treatment option.

"We need to confirm these findings in larger numbers of patients but using these types of blood tests could allow true personalisation of treatment for prostate cancer patients, based on the cancer mutations we detect."

Professor Paul Workman, interim chief executive at the Institute of Cancer Research, said: "This important discovery reveals how some cancer treatments can actually favour the survival of the nastiest cancer cells, and sets out the rationale for repeated monitoring of patients using blood tests, in order to track and intervene in the evolution of their cancers."

The study, funded by Prostate Cancer UK and Cancer Research UK, is reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

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10 Biggest Prostate Cancer Findings So Far

New Advice On Prostate Cancer Screening(01 of10)

This year, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended against routine prostate cancer screening for men of all ages, noting its small benefits compared to the harms, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. "We think the benefit is very small," Dr. Michael LeFevre, a member of the task force, told NPR's Shots blog. "Our range is between zero and one prostate cancer death avoided for every thousand men screened," which is minuscule compared to lives saved for screenings for conditions like colorectal cancer. A study published at the beginning of the year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute seemed to back up the recommendations, noting that routine prostate cancer screening didn't seem to make a difference in the risk of dying from prostate cancer, Reuters reported.However, the American Society of Clinical Oncology issued advice after the USPSTF's recommendation, saying that whether a man gets routine prostate cancer screening should depend on his life expectancy. For example, men who aren't expected to live more than another 10 years should be discouraged from PSA testing, the Associated Press reported. (credit:Alamy)

PSA Testing Could Mean Fewer Cases Of Deadly Prostate Cancer(02 of10)

To add more to the research on prostate cancer screening, a study in the journal Cancer showed that routine PSA testing is linked with 17,000 fewer cases of the deadliest form of prostate cancer."By not using PSA tests in the vast majority of men, you have to accept you are going to increase very serious metastatic disease threefold," study researcher Dr. Edward Messing, M.D., the chief of urology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, told WebMD. Specifically, researchers calculated that without routine prostate cancer screenings through PSA testing, 25,000 men would have been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer (a deadly form of prostate cancer where it has spread beyond the prostate to elsewhere in the body) in 2008, compared with the 8,000 who were actually diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer that year, WebMD reported. (credit:Alamy)

Working The Night Shift Could Raise Your Risk(03 of10)

Working the night shift is associated with a 2.77-times increased risk of prostate cancer, according to a study in the American Journal of Epidemiology.The study, conducted by Canadian researchers included 3,137 men with cancer and 512 men without cancer. The researchers also found that working the night shift raised the risk of lung, colon, bladder, rectal and pancreatic cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. (credit:Alamy)

Surgery May Not Be The Best Option For Everyone With Prostate Cancer (04 of10)

Surgery may not always be the best option for men whose prostate cancer is detected with an elevated PSA (prostate-specific antigen) level, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. For men with early prostate cancer who received a radical prostatectomy (prostate-removal surgery), 47 percent died after 12 years, while 49.9 percent of men who just underwent observation died after 12 years, ABC News reported. Plus 81 percent of men who underwent the radical prostatectomy experienced erectile dysfunction in the two years following, and urinary incontinence plagued 17 percent of the men, WebMD reported.However, ABC News did note that men whose PSA scores were extremely high -- above 10 -- benefited from receiving surgery, indicating that the study may suggest rather which men may benefit most from receiving a radical prostatectomy for their prostate cancer. (credit:Shutterstock)

Aspirin Could Help Prostate Cancer Patients Live Longer (05 of10)

Prostate cancer patients who take aspirin could cut their risk of dying from the disease, Harvard researchers reported this year.The New York Times reported on the study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, which showed that taking aspirin cut in half the risk of dying of prostate cancer over a decade -- 8 percent of aspirin-nontakers died, compared with 3 percent of aspirin-takers. (credit:Shutterstock)

Circumcision Could Affect Risk (06 of10)

Circumcision -- or the removal of a man's foreskin before he has sex for the first time -- is linked with a lower risk of developing prostate cancer, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center scientists found this year.The findings, published in the journal Cancer, shows that prostate cancer risk for men who are circumcised before the first time they have sex is 15 percent lower, compared with uncircumcised men. While Dr. Andrew Freedman, who is on the American Academy of Pediatrics' circumcision task force but was not involved in the study, found the findings thought-provoking, he told HuffPost in an earlier article that "this kind of epidemiological research -- how A affects B, and B affects C -- is very difficult to do and makes it very difficult to account for confounding variables." (credit:Alamy)

Pan-Fried Meat Could Raise Risk (07 of10)

Including pan-fried meat in your weekly meal rotations is linked with a higher risk of prostate cancer, University of Southern California researchers found. Specifically, men who eat one-and-a-half servings of red meat that's been pan-fried each week have a 30 percent increased risk of advanced prostate cancer. And men who eat two-and-a-half servings of the food have a 40 percent increased risk. Hamburger meat in particular -- compared with a red meat like steak -- seemed linked with the increased risk, according to the Carcinogenesis study. And while not a red meat, pan-fried poultry also seemed linked with the increased prostate cancer risk (while baked poultry was associated with a lower prostate cancer risk). (credit:Shutterstock)

Genetic 'Signatures' Could Predict Aggressive Disease (08 of10)

Genes could hold a clue to who will go on to develop aggressive prostate cancer, researchers found this year. Reuters reported on the Lancet Oncology study, showing aggressive tumors might be able to be predicted by two genetic "signatures":

Researchers in Britain and the United States found that by reading the patterns of genes switched on and off in blood cells, they could accurately detect which advanced prostate cancer patients had the worst survival rates.

(credit:Alamy)

Blood Pressure Could Affect Risk Of Dying From Prostate Cancer (09 of10)

The risk of dying from prostate cancer is higher if you also have high blood pressure, European researchers found.Specifically, hypertension was linked with a 62 percent increased risk of dying for people with prostate cancer. "When we looked to see if the metabolic factors are related to an increased risk of getting or dying from prostate cancer we found a relationship with death from the disease and high blood pressure," study researcher Christel Haggstrom, of Umea University, told HuffPost UK. "There was also a link to high BMI but blood pressure had the strongest association to increased risk. The results for BMI are in line with previous findings in large studies." (credit:Shutterstock)

Green Tea Is Good (10 of10)

Research presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research this year showed that drinking green tea could help ward off inflammation in men with prostate cancer who are about to undergo prostate-removal surgery. "Our study showed that drinking six cups of green tea affected biomarkers in prostate tissue at the time of surgery," study researcher Susanne M. Henning, Ph.D., R.D., of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles, said in a statement. "This research offers new insights into the mechanisms by which green tea consumption may reduce the risk for prostate cancer by opposing processes such as inflammation, which are associated with prostate cancer growth." (credit:Alamy)

Dr Matthew Hobbs, deputy director of research at Prostate Cancer UK, said: "There are currently too few treatment options for men living with advanced stage prostate cancer. Not only do we desperately need to find more treatments for this group of men, we also need to understand more about when those that are available stop working and why.

"This research is important as it shows that there might be a new way to monitor how a man's cancer is changing during treatment and that could help us to pinpoint the stage at which some drugs stop being effective."

Nell Barrie, science information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: "It's vital to understand the genetic twists and turns that offer tumour cells an escape route to become resistant to treatment. And this study provides an important first step towards working out how to use tumour DNA from blood samples as a way to monitor how prostate cancer evolves during treatment."

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