Research article

No major association between TGFBR1*6A and prostate cancer

Virginia Kaklamani¹ , Lisa Baddi¹ , Diana Rosman¹ , Junjian Liu¹ , Nathan Ellis² , Carole Oddoux³ , Harry Ostrer³ , Yu Chen⁴ , Habibul Ahsan⁴ , Kenneth Offit² and Boris Pasche¹

¹  Cancer Genetics Program, Division of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Medicine and Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, USA

²  Clinical Genetics Service, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York, USA

³  Human Genetics Program, Department of Pediatrics, New York University Medical Center, New York, N.Y., 10016, USA

⁴  Department of Epidemiology of Mailman School of Public Health and Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA

author email corresponding author email

BMC Genetics 2004, 5:28doi:10.1186/1471-2156-5-28

Published:	22 September 2004

Abstract

Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men and one of the leading causes of cancer deaths. There is strong genetic evidence indicating that a large proportion of prostate cancers are caused by heritable factors but the search for prostate cancer susceptibility genes has thus far remained elusive. TGFBR1*6A, a common hypomorphic variant of the type I Transforming Growth Factor Beta receptor, is emerging as a tumor susceptibility allele that predisposes to the development of breast, colon and ovarian cancer. The association with prostate cancer has not yet been explored. A total of 907 cases and controls from New York City were genotyped to test the hypothesis that TGFBR1*6A may contribute to the development of prostate cancer. TGFBR1*6A allelic frequency among cases (0.086) was slightly higher than among controls (0.080) but the differences in TGFBR1*6A genotype distribution between cases and controls did not reach statistical significance (p = 0.67). Our data suggest that TGFBR1*6A does not contribute to the development of prostate cancer.