Association between sequence variants at 17q12 and 17q24.3 and prostate cancer risk in European and African Americans

BACKGROUND. Three SNPs at 17q12 and four SNPs at 17q24.3 were recently identified to be associated with prostate cancer risk using a genome-wide association study. METHODS. We evaluated these 7 SNPs in two hospital-based case-control study populations, including European Americans (EA; 1,563 cases and 576 controls) and African Americans (AA; 364 cases and 353 controls). RESULTS. Each of the reported risk alleles of these seven SNPs were more common in cases than in controls among EA and AA. The differences were highly significant in EA (P = 10^-4) and marginally significant in AA (P = 0.04) for SNPs at 17q12. In contrast, the differences were not statistically significant in EA or AA for SNPs at 17q24.3, but were marginally significant for two SNPs (P = 0.04-0.06) when EA and AA subjects were combined. Similar results were obtained when genotype and haplotype frequencies between cases and controls were analyzed. These risk variants were not associated with more aggressive prostate cancer or other clinical variables such as TNM stage, pre-operative PSA, or age at diagnosis. CONCLUSIONS. Results from our study provide the first confirmation of these 17q SNPs as novel prostate cancer susceptibility loci in EA and the first indication that these two loci may also play roles in prostate cancer risk among AA.