Publications by authors named "Kathryn Penney"

The most common somatic alteration in primary prostate cancer is the TMPRSS2:ERG gene fusion, which may be caused or promoted by distinct etiologic factors. The objective of this systematic review was to assess epidemiologic evidence on etiologic factors for prostate cancer by tumor TMPRSS2:ERG fusion status in human populations. Of 3071 publications identified, 19 cohort or case-control studies from six distinct study populations were included in this systematic review.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: To determine the relationship between germline pathogenic variants (PV) in cancer predisposition genes and the risk of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).

Experimental Design: Germline PV frequencies in breast cancer predisposition genes (ATM, BARD1, BRCA1, BRCA2, CDH1, CHEK2, PALB2, RAD51C, and RAD51D) were compared between DCIS cases and unaffected controls and between DCIS and invasive ductal breast cancer (IDC) cases from a clinical testing cohort (n = 9,887), a population-based cohort (n = 3,876), and the UK Biobank (n = 2,421). The risk of contralateral breast cancer (CBC) for DCIS cases with PV was estimated in the population-based cohort.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Genetic variation at the 19q13.3 KLK locus is linked with prostate cancer susceptibility in men. The non-synonymous KLK3 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), rs17632542 (c.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: Deleterious germline variants in certain DNA repair genes are risk factors for developing aggressive prostate cancer. The objective was to quantify their prognostic impact after prostate cancer diagnosis.

Experimental Design: Men with prostate cancer, predominantly of European ancestry, were included from four cohorts with long-term follow-up.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The American Cancer Society suggests that doctors should talk to women about endometrial cancer risks when they reach menopause, but more younger women under 50 are being diagnosed.
  • A study looked at nearly 14,000 women with endometrial cancer and found that factors like body weight and diabetes increase the risk for both younger and older women.
  • Educating women about these risk factors could help reduce the number of cases, as many endometrial cancer cases in both age groups are linked to these factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Higher levels of aneuploidy, characterized by imbalanced chromosome numbers, are associated with lethal progression in prostate cancer. However, how aneuploidy contributes to prostate cancer aggressiveness remains poorly understood. In this study, we assessed in patients which genes on chromosome 8q, one of the most frequently gained chromosome arms in prostate tumors, were most strongly associated with long-term risk of cancer progression to metastases and death from prostate cancer (lethal disease) in 403 patients and found the strongest candidate was cohesin subunit gene, , with an odds ratio of 3.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

High circulating vitamin D levels and supplementation may lower prostate cancer mortality. To probe for direct effects of vitamin D signaling in the primary tumor, we assessed how activation of intratumoral vitamin D signaling in prostate cancer is associated with lethal prostate cancer during long-term follow-up. Among 404 participants with primary prostate cancer in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and the Physicians' Health Study, we defined a gene score of expected activated intratumoral vitamin D signaling consisting of transcriptionally upregulated (CYP27A1, CYP2R1, RXRA, RXRB, and VDR) and downregulated genes (CYP24A1 and DHCR7).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: Prostate cancer, a leading cause of cancer death among men, urgently requires new prevention strategies, which may involve targeting men with an underlying genetic susceptibility.

Objective: To explore differences in risk of early prostate cancer death among men with higher vs lower genetic risk to inform prevention efforts.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cohort study used a combined analysis of genotyped men without prostate cancer at inclusion and with lifestyle data in 2 prospective cohort studies in Sweden and the US, the Malmö Diet and Cancer Study (MDCS) and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (HPFS), followed up from 1991 to 2019.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: Family history and germline genetic risk single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been separately shown to stratify lifetime risk of prostate cancer. Here, we evaluate the combined prognostic value of family history of prostate and other related cancers and germline risk SNPs among patients with favorable-risk prostate cancer.

Materials And Methods: A total of 1367 participants from the prospective Health Professionals Follow-up Study diagnosed with low- or favorable intermediate-risk prostate cancer from 1986 to 2017 underwent genome-wide SNP genotyping.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The incidence rates of endometrial cancer are increasing, which may partly be explained by the rising prevalence of obesity, an established risk factor for endometrial cancer. Hypertension, another component of metabolic syndrome, is also increasing in prevalence, and emerging evidence suggests that it may be associated with the development of certain cancers. The role of hypertension independent of other components of metabolic syndrome in the etiology of endometrial cancer remains unclear.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) is a key method for detecting significant prostate cancer, and this study explores if adding a 400-variant polygenic risk score (PRS) enhances its effectiveness.
  • Analyzing data from 24,617 men, it was found that those in the top PRS quartile had a higher likelihood of having clinically significant prostate cancer compared to those in the bottom quartile.
  • Utilizing the PRS in a biopsy selection scenario reduced the chances of missing clinically significant cancers, suggesting its potential to improve cancer detection outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Prostate cancer has high heritability. Healthy lifestyle has been associated with lower lethal prostate cancer risk among men at increased genetic susceptibility, but the role of healthy dietary patterns remains unknown. We prospectively followed 10,269 genotyped men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (1993-2019).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction And Hypothesis: The objective of this study was to determine whether differences in the cumulative dietary intake of choline, is associated with the risk of developing urge urinary incontinence (UUI).

Methods: This was an analysis within the Nurses' Health Study (NHS) I and II. The main exposure was the cumulative daily intake for each choline-containing compound obtained from a detailed daily food frequency questionnaire.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Studies have shown improved survival among individuals with cancer with higher levels of social support. Few studies have investigated social support and overall survival (OS) in individuals with advanced prostate cancer in an international cohort. We investigated the associations of marital status and living arrangements with OS among individuals with advanced prostate cancer in the International Registry for Men with Advanced Prostate Cancer (IRONMAN).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • A recent study analyzed genetic data from over 156,000 prostate cancer cases and 788,000 controls from diverse populations, significantly increasing the representation of non-European participants.
  • Researchers identified 187 new genetic risk variants for prostate cancer, bringing the total to 451, enhancing understanding of genetic factors across different ancestries.
  • The developed genetic risk score (GRS) showed varying risk levels for prostate cancer among different ancestry groups, highlighting its potential for better risk assessment, especially in men of African descent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Previously suggested modifiable risk factors for prostate cancer could have resulted from detection bias because diagnosis requires a biopsy. We investigated modifiable risk factors for a subsequent cancer diagnosis among men with an initially negative prostate biopsy.

Methods: In total, 10,396 participants of the Health Professionals Follow-up Study with an initial negative prostate biopsy after 1994 were followed for incident prostate cancer until 2017.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Solute carrier organic anion (SLCO) transporters (OATP transporters) are involved in cellular uptake of drugs and hormones. Germline variants in SLCO1B3 and SLCO2B1 have been implicated in prostate cancer progression and therapy response, including to androgen deprivation and statin medications, but results have appeared heterogeneous. We conducted a cohort study of five single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in SLCO1B3 and SLCO2B1 with prior evidence among 3208 men with prostate cancer who participated in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study or the Physicians' Health Study, following participants prospectively after diagnosis over 32 years (median, 14 years) for development of metastases and cancer-specific death (lethal disease, 382 events).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The prostate cancer subtype defined by the presence of TMPRSS2:ERG has been shown to be molecularly and epidemiologically distinct. However, few studies have investigated germline genetic variants associating with TMPRSS2:ERG fusion status.

Methods: We performed a genome-wide association study with 396 TMPRSS2:ERG(+) cases, 390 TMPRSS2:ERG(-) cases, and 2,386 cancer-free controls from the Physicians' Health Study (PHS), the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS), and a Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson (FH) Cancer Center Prostate Cancer Study.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: We studied whether adding percent free PSA to total PSA improves prediction of clinically significant prostate cancer and fatal prostate cancer.

Materials And Methods: A total of 6,727 men within the intervention arm of PLCO (Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial) had baseline percent free PSA. Of this cohort, 475 had clinically significant prostate cancer and 98 had fatal prostate cancer.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Genome-wide polygenic risk scores (GW-PRSs) have been reported to have better predictive ability than PRSs based on genome-wide significance thresholds across numerous traits. We compared the predictive ability of several GW-PRS approaches to a recently developed PRS of 269 established prostate cancer-risk variants from multi-ancestry GWASs and fine-mapping studies (PRS). GW-PRS models were trained with a large and diverse prostate cancer GWAS of 107,247 cases and 127,006 controls that we previously used to develop the multi-ancestry PRS.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Genome-wide polygenic risk scores (GW-PRS) were analyzed for their predictive ability regarding prostate cancer risk, compared to an established multi-ancestry polygenic risk score (PRS).
  • The GW-PRS models utilized data from a large and diverse group of nearly 235,000 participants, including individuals from both African and European ancestries.
  • Results showed that while GW-PRS had varying predictive abilities, the multi-ancestry PRS performed equally well or better in predicting prostate cancer risk for both ancestry groups, indicating GW-PRS may not offer significant improvements in risk prediction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Adverse neighborhood social and natural (green space) environments may contribute to the etiology of prostate cancer (CaP), but mechanisms are unclear. We examined associations between neighborhood environment and prostate intratumoral inflammation in 967 men diagnosed with CaP with available tissue samples from 1986-2009 in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Exposures were linked to work or residential addresses in 1988.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Unlabelled: Men with a low prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level (<1 ng/ml) in midlife may extend the rescreening interval (if aged 40-59 yr) or forgo future PSA screening (if aged >60 yr) owing to their low risk of aggressive prostate cancer (PCa). However, there is a subset of men who develop lethal PCa despite low baseline PSA. We investigated how a PCa polygenic risk score (PRS) in addition to baseline PSA impacts the prediction of lethal PCa among 483 men aged 40-70 yr from the Physicians' Health Study followed over a median of 33 yr.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Prostate cancer has a heterogeneous prognosis. Most previous studies have focused on the identification of prognostic biomarkers in the prostate cancer tumor. However, it is increasingly recognized that the tumor microenvironment contributes to prostate cancer aggressiveness and progression.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Unlabelled: The most common somatic event in primary prostate cancer is a fusion between the androgen-related TMPRSS2 gene and the ERG oncogene. Tumors with these fusions, which occur early in carcinogenesis, have a distinctive etiology. A smaller subset of other tumors harbor fusions between TMPRSS2 and members of the ETS transcription factor family other than ERG.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF