( CeRePPFrench Prostate Case-Control St...)Researchers Discover a Common Variation in a Gene Segment that,Increases the Risk for Prostate Cancer,Health

Prostate cancer is the third-leading cause of cancer-related death in men yet very little is known about its origins. In 2007 in the United States, there will be an estimated 219,000 new prostate cancer cases and an estimated 27,000 deaths in the U.S.

Similar data on breast cancer, the second-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women in the U.S., are now being generated and are expected to be released soon. The CGEMS database will soon contain close to 2.5 billion genotypes, allowing researchers to identify genetic risk factors for breast and prostate cancers using 540,000 SNPs across the genome. By comprehensively surveying for common genetic variations and following-up promising findings in confirmatory studies, researchers hope to identify and verify associations that increase or decrease the risk of these cancers.

Analyses and data from the CGEMS study will be available through NCI's caBIG™ (Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™), at http://caIntegrator.nci.nih.gov/cgems/. The summary results from the scan in PLCO are already freely available to other researchers at this website.

For more information on NCI's Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility (CGEMS) initiative and NCIs Cohort Consortium, including collaborating studies and institutions, please visit http://cgems.cancer.gov, and http://epi.grants.cancer.gov/Consortia/cohort.html.

For more information about cancer or the National Cancer Institute, please visit the NCI website at http://www.cancer.gov or call NCI's Cancer Information Service at 1-800
'"/>