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Department of Biostatistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105 [E. M. L., C. D. L.]; Departments of Internal Medicine [E. M. L., H. C., K. B., H. L., K. A. C.], Surgery [K. A. C.], and Pathology [K. J. W.], University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-0946; and Department of Biomathematics, University of CaliforniaLos Angeles School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California 90095 [K. L.]
| Abstract |
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2 tests, and logistic
regression; analyses were subsequently repeated to incorporate only men
with moderate- to high-grade prostate cancer. No association between
AR CAG allele length and prostate cancer was detected
when either a subset of unrelated patients or a subset of unrelated
patients with moderate- to high-grade cancer was compared with a set of
unrelated controls. We failed to detect an association between short
AR CAG alleles and early age of prostate cancer
diagnosis. Once specific hereditary prostate cancer genes have been
identified, future studies can more carefully delineate the potential
role of this AR polymorphism as a modifier locus in
high-risk families. | Introduction |
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In 1995, investigators at the University of Michigan initiated the Prostate Cancer Genetics Project with the goal of determining the molecular basis for the inherited predisposition to prostate cancer. We now report the analysis of AR CAG repeat length in 270 Caucasian prostate cancer patients who are participating in this study. We set out to determine whether prostate cancer was linked to the AR gene and whether we could measure an effect of short AR CAG alleles on the occurrence, age of diagnosis, and/or histological grade of prostate cancer in our families.
| Materials and Methods |
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Histological Grade of Prostate Cancer.
The pathology records documenting 266 cases of prostate cancer were
reviewed without knowledge of the AR CAG repeat length, and
264 cases were categorized into one of three groups: histological grade
1 (G1) with a Gleason sum
6 or well-differentiated prostate cancer;
histological grade 2 (G2) with a Gleason sum 7 or moderately
differentiated prostate cancer; and histological grade 3 (G3) with
Gleason sum
8 or poorly differentiated prostate cancer. Insufficient
information was available in the pathology reports of the remaining two
cases to determine grade. These two cases, along with the four cases
without pathological records, were excluded from analyses that included
histological grade. In situations where multiple pathology reports were
received, priority was given to the grade assigned to the largest
volume of resected tumor (e.g., prostatectomy
versus biopsy), to the primary diagnosis (instead of
recurrence or metastasis), and to the grade assigned by the most
experienced genitourinary pathologist in the case of second opinions.
Determination of AR Exon 1 CAG Trinucleotide Repeat Length.
Genomic DNA was extracted from whole blood using a commercially
available kit (Puregene DNA extraction kit; Gentra Systems, Inc.,
Research Triangle Park, NC). DNA (100 ng) was amplified by two rounds
of PCR using nested primers flanking the CAG repeat in exon 1 of the
AR gene, with modifications of the protocol of Irvine
et al. (10)
. The CAG repeat lengths were
calibrated by comparing PCR product size to the PCR product of a CAG
allele, the repeat length of which was determined by direct sequencing.
CAG Repeat Lengths from a General Caucasian Population.
The allele frequencies of the AR CAG repeat sequence
in the general Caucasian population were derived from the studies of
Irvine et al. (10)
and Stanford et
al. (5)
. The first study reported the AR
CAG repeat length from 39 apparently healthy men over the age of 35 yr
from Los Angeles, California (10)
. The second study
described similar data from 266 men residing in King County,
Washington, who were between the ages of 4064 yr and had no history
of prostate cancer (5)
. Combining these studies provided
AR CAG repeat data from 305 apparently healthy Caucasian men
residing in the United States who were over 35 yr of age.
Linkage Analyses.
To assess the degree of allele sharing among affected relatives
at the AR CAG locus and, hence, linkage of prostate cancer
to the AR gene, we performed nonparametric linkage analysis
using GENEHUNTER version 1.3 (11
, 12)
.
Other Statistical Analyses.
Previous studies have suggested an inverse relationship between
AR CAG allele size and prostate cancer occurrence. Hence,
both one-sided and two-sided statistical tests were computed.
Permutation tests (13)
using the standard
t-statistic were implemented. Because the permutation
t test makes no distributional assumptions, derived
Ps are more accurate than the Ps of the
parametric t test. Empirical Ps cited are based
on 1000 or more random permutations of these data.
To analyze the possibility of association between the CAG repeats in
the AR gene and prostate cancer, we calculated Pearsons
2 tests for the relevant 2 x 2
contingency tables (SAS System software; SAS Institute, Inc., Cary,
NC). All results are reported as ORs with two-sided 95% CIs. These
calculations were conducted using an amended estimator for the OR
incorporating a continuity correction as suggested by Gart and Zweifel
(14)
and Haldane (15)
. We also performed a
logistic regression analysis to determine the OR for a decrease in
allele size of one CAG repeat (3 bp). Genotype data were available from
more than one affected male in 116 of 133 pedigrees (87%). Due to the
potential correlation of affection status and AR CAG repeat
length among affected family members, only one family member was
included in the hypothesis tests for equal mean allele length and
distributional homogeneity. Probands were selected for these analyses
in 113 of 116 or 97.4% of families. In the remaining three families,
the proband was unaffected; therefore, the first affected family member
from which DNA was collected was used. Thus, the preceding hypotheses
were tested using 133 unrelated prostate cancer patients and 305
healthy male controls.
Analyses were also performed to explore the relationship between short CAG alleles and high-grade prostate cancer. We used a strategy to select one prostate cancer case with the highest grade from each family that had one or more cases of G2 or G3 prostate cancer (defined as Gleason grade 710 or moderate to poorly differentiated cancer, n = 93 families). G3 cases were always selected over G2 cases. If a family had two or more cases of G2 or G3 prostate cancer, one case was randomly chosen for this analysis. Permutation t tests and association tests, as described previously, were implemented on this defined subset of study participants.
To investigate the potential relationship between age of prostate cancer diagnosis and length of the CAG repeat at the AR locus, we implemented the generalized estimation equations (GEE1) approach of Zeger and Liang (16) ; we assumed Gaussian observations and used the sandwich estimator of the variance to account for the correlation in age of diagnosis among related men. This approach allowed genotype data from all 270 affected men to be incorporated into the analysis. Hypothesis tests were also performed conditioning on histological grade.
| Results |
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The allele frequencies for the AR CAG repeat in the probands
from our families with two or more cases of cancer (see "Materials
and Methods") are compared graphically to allele frequencies from a
control sample in Fig. 1
. Permutation t tests were used to compare our population of
prostate cancer patients to the control sample. We found no evidence
that the mean allele length of the AR CAG fragments in the
patient population is smaller than the mean allele length of the
AR CAG fragments in the control population (one-sided
P = 0.86 and two-sided P = 0.28; Table 1
).
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17 versus >17 repeats
(17)
,
21 versus >21 repeats (5
, 10)
, or
18 versus
26 repeats (Ref.
6
; Table 2
|
Allele length at the AR CAG polymorphism was found to have no significant effect on the age of diagnosis of prostate cancer (two-sided P = 0.90). The interaction between prostate cancer grade and allele size on age of diagnosis was not found to be significant (two-sided P = 0.57) using a model wherein G1 cases were compared with G2 and G3 cases. Furthermore, no difference in age of diagnosis was detected between the three different grades of prostate cancer after correcting for familial correlation (two-sided P = 0.97).
| Discussion |
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There are a number of possible factors that may have contributed
to the lack of an observed association between short AR CAG
alleles and prostate cancer in our study. The effect of short
AR CAG alleles on prostate cancer risk, as determined in two
case-control studies, is relatively small, if present at all (relative
risk,
1.5; Refs. 5
and 6
). Lack of a
uniform model of analysis also makes these studies difficult to
compare. Giovannucci et al. (6)
examined CAG
repeat length as a continuous variable and also compared men with
18
repeats with men with
26 repeats. Stanford et al.
(5)
and Irvine et al. (10)
used
the median number of 22 to divide their population for analysis. It is
unclear whether these studies examined multiple cutoffs and were
appropriately corrected for multiple testing. This point is
particularly important given the rather weak evidence for association
of short AR CAG alleles and prostate cancer incidence, as
well as the variety of different models possible for viewing these
data.
Population heterogeneity is a potential problem that may be encountered in case-control genetic epidemiology studies. If there are undetected racial/ethnic differences between the cases and unrelated controls, an apparent association between a particular allele and a disease may be confounded. This is a critical concern in studies of prostate cancer, where disease incidence varies dramatically with racial and ethnic background. Our study, as well as the previously reported AR CAG case-control studies, were all subject to the possible effects of genetic heterogeneity.
The patients described here are all participants in the University of
Michigan Prostate Cancer Genetics Project; they were selected for this
study because of early-onset and/or a positive family history of
prostate cancer. Indeed, 39 of our families (29% of the total of 133
families) fulfilled at least one or more of the proposed clinical
criteria for HPC [these criteria are: (a) three or more
affected individuals within one nuclear family; (b) affected
individuals occurring in three successive generations (maternal or
paternal lineage); or (c) a cluster of two or more relatives
each affected before the age of 55 yr (19)
]. The prostate
cancer in these families may be attributable to one or more highly
penetrant HPC genes that may mask the relatively modest
potential effect of the AR CAG polymorphism. However,
Rebbeck et al. (20)
recently reported that
AR alleles containing very long (
29) CAG repeats may lead
to an earlier age of breast cancer onset in women who also carry a
BRCA1 germline mutation. The role of the AR locus
as a modifier of prostate cancer risk in these prostate families can be
examined more thoroughly in the future as HPC genes are
identified and characterized.
Previous studies have suggested that short AR CAG alleles
may predispose to more aggressive forms of prostate cancer, as
indicated by high Gleason score tumors and/or advanced stage at
diagnosis (6
, 17
, 21)
. In our analyses, which incorporated
grade, we chose to group all cases up to and including Gleason sum 6,
rather than Gleason sum 4, as "well-differentiated" or G1 cases.
There is increasing evidence that prostate cancer progression may be
more closely correlated with the percentage of Gleason grades 4 and/or
5 cancer (which correlates with a Gleason sum of 7 or higher; Ref.
22
). Thus, we chose to divide our cases to emphasize the
contribution of Gleason grades 4 and/or 5 cancer. Notably, the
percentage of cancers that were scored as Gleason sum
7 is greater in
the families presented here compared with the prostate cancer families
described by Gronberg et al. (Ref. 23
; 53%
versus 33%).
In conclusion, linkage of prostate cancer to the AR gene was not observed. Taken together with the report by Sun et al. (24) , the AR gene does not seem to significantly contribute to the observed clustering of prostate cancer in families. Furthermore, we found no evidence for an association between short AR CAG repeat lengths and the occurrence of prostate cancer when comparing representative subsets of unrelated men drawn from 270 familial prostate cancer patients to a pooled control sample. There was also no detectable effect of short CAG alleles on the age of prostate cancer diagnosis or on the development of high-grade cancer in this data set. This is the first comprehensive study of the AR CAG polymorphism in men with early-onset and/or a family history of prostate cancer. Because we could not detect an effect of this polymorphism in our patients, we suggest that the AR gene may play a minor role in the heritable form of this disease. However, as HPC genes are identified, future studies may further delineate the potential role of the AR gene as a modifier locus in prostate cancer families.
| Acknowledgments |
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| Footnotes |
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1 Supported by USPHS Grants RO1-GM53275,
P50-CA69568, and TG-HG00040 (National Center for Human Genome Research)
and the Office of Vice President for Research at the University of
Michigan. ![]()
2 To whom requests for reprints should be
addressed, at 7310 CCGC, 1500 East Medical Center Drive, Ann Arbor, MI
48109-0946. Phone: (734) 764-2248; Fax: (734) 647-9480; E-mail: kcooney{at}umich.edu ![]()
3 The abbreviations used are: AR, androgen
receptor; OR, odds ratio; CI, confidence interval; HPC, hereditary
prostate cancer; NPL, nonparametric linkage. ![]()
Received 7/27/99; revised 1/26/00; accepted 2/ 1/00.
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