Professor of Radiation Biology, Catharine West from The University of Manchester’s Institute of Cancer Sciences led the research. She said: “The first studies into SNPs were smaller. We needed to show we could combine them to increase the number of patients investigated and improve our ability to identify genetic variants. Centres give radiotherapy in different ways and we needed to show this variability was not a problem.”
The two variants found were associated with an increased frequency of urinating and a decreased flow of urine.
The causes for the associations are unclear, but the two SNPs identified are located in the regions of genes that are expressed in tissues exposed to radiation.
The results show radiotherapy cohorts can be combined and larger studies should identify enough variants to develop a test to predict a cancer patient’s risk of radiotherapy side-effects.
Professor West added: “There are currently more than 32 million people alive five years after having cancer, so the side-effects of their treatment are an important issue for them. If we can develop a test that means people can reduce the risk of these problems that will be of huge benefit to this group.”
Kerns SL, Dorling L, Fachal L et al. (2016). Meta-analysis of Genome Wide Association Studies Identifies Novel Genetic Markers of Late Toxicity Following Radiotherapy for Prostate Cancer. EBioMedicine doi:10.1016/j.ebiom.2016.07.022
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Markers that cause toxic radiotherapy side-effects in prostate cancer identified
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