Implications of polygenic risk-stratified screening for prostate cancer on overdiagnosis

Nora Pashayan, Stephen W. Duffy, David E. Neal, Freddie C. Hamdy, Jenny L. Donovan, Richard M. Martin, Patricia Harrington, Sara Benlloch, Ali Amin Al Olama, Mitul Shah, Zsofia Kote-Jarai, Douglas F. Easton, Rosalind Eeles, Paul D. Pharoah

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

80 Scopus citations

Abstract

Purpose:This study aimed to quantify the probability of overdiagnosis of prostate cancer by polygenic risk.Methods:We calculated the polygenic risk score based on 66 known prostate cancer susceptibility variants for 17,012 men aged 50-69 years (9,404 men identified with prostate cancer and 7,608 with no cancer) derived from three UK-based ongoing studies. We derived the probabilities of overdiagnosis by quartiles of polygenic risk considering that the observed prevalence of screen-detected prostate cancer is a combination of underlying incidence, mean sojourn time (MST), test sensitivity, and overdiagnosis.Results:Polygenic risk quartiles 1 to 4 comprised 9, 18, 25, and 48% of the cases, respectively. For a prostate-specific antigen test sensitivity of 80% and MST of 9 years, 43, 30, 25, and 19% of the prevalent screen-detected cancers in quartiles 1 to 4, respectively, were likely to be overdiagnosed cancers. Overdiagnosis decreased with increasing polygenic risk, with 56% decrease between the lowest and the highest polygenic risk quartiles.Conclusion:Targeting screening to men at higher polygenic risk could reduce the problem of overdiagnosis and lead to a better benefit-to-harm balance in screening for prostate cancer.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)789-795
Number of pages7
JournalGenetics in Medicine
Volume17
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 1 2015
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • overdiagnosis
  • polygenic risk
  • prostate cancer
  • riskstratified screening

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