Prostate Cancer

Abstract

In personalized medicine (PM), the aim is to provide individual risk assessment for medical conditions, or to predict the efficacy of measures intended to monitor, prevent, or treat these conditions (. http://www.personalizedmedicinecoalition.org). The approaches of PM could be important in addressing clinical and public health issues involved in a variety of diseases, including cancers that are detected via population-level screening. This is particularly relevant to prostate cancer (PCa), where concerns have been raised regarding prostate-specific antigen screening, subsequent overdiagnosis of low-grade diseases, and ultimately overtreatment of many indolent cancers. These interrelated issues have prompted a significant effort to identify markers that can effectively differentiate individuals who have different risks for PCa onset or progression. Improved risk estimation may help to address this major public health problem, as the prostate is the most common site of cancer diagnosis, accounting for approximately 26% of all new cancer diagnoses and 9% of cancer deaths in US men. This translates to an estimated 220,800 PCa diagnoses and 27,540 deaths in US men each year (Siegel et al., 2015. CA Cancer J Clin).