Blood Test May Reveal Prostate Cancer Risk Decades Before Diagnosis

“Detecting proteins in blood that are associated with known prostate cancer driver genes in samples collected many years before diagnosis gives us new insight into the earliest stages of the disease,” said Carl Smith-Byrne, the study's senior author from Oxford.

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer among men worldwide, after lung cancer, Euronews reports.

Researchers from the University of Oxford analyzed blood samples collected between 1992 and 2000 from more than 2,500 men. They compared baseline samples from 982 men who subsequently developed prostate cancer with samples from 1,573 men who did not develop the disease.

The team measured more than 6,000 different proteins in each participant's blood plasma. Since the samples had been collected years before diagnosis, in some cases more than 15 years earlier, the researchers were able to identify early biochemical signals in the form of changes in protein levels.

Some proteins were associated with an increased overall risk of prostate cancer, while others were primarily linked to aggressive or fast-growing forms of the disease. At the same time, men with higher levels of certain immune system proteins, such as GZMK and ANXA2, had a lower long-term risk of prostate cancer, according to the study.

“Many prostate tumors grow slowly and may never cause harm, while others are aggressive and life-threatening,” said Jae Huan, the study's first author and a postdoctoral epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health.

“Ultimately, we hope this will help us better understand the biology of aggressive prostate cancer and identify markers that could enable more accurate risk assessment in the future,” Huan added.

The researchers emphasize that the findings cannot yet be considered a fully developed screening test and require further validation.

“Combined with existing and future genetic data, these findings may help us identify biological pathways that could be targeted to prevent aggressive prostate cancer,” Smith-Byrne said.