Given that prostate cancer is a finding found in most autopsies of any American over 80, it'd be interesting to know how they controlled for age in the study. Instead of a tendency to develop PC, they may have just discovered markers for a tendency to develop PC at an earlier age.
As far as I'm concerned, PC is systemic, and in our culture is a naturally occuring disease of aging.
Apparently, for those with the wrong genes, it can be fatal at younger age. It can really be ugly. I saw metastatic disease which caused the permanent protrusion of the tongue. Otherwise, you live longer and die from something else. I haven't been able searching PubMed or Nature Genetics to find the title and abstract using the senior author's name.
Admixture mapping identifies 8q24 as a prostate cancer risk locus in African-American men pdf link to the article.
A whole-genome admixture scan in 1,597 African Americans identi- fied a 3.8Mbinterval on chromosome 8q24 as significantly associated with susceptibility to prostate cancer [logarithm of odds (LOD)7.1]. The increased risk because of inheriting African ancestry is greater in men diagnosed before 72 years of age (P < 0.00032) and may contribute to the epidemiological observation that the higher risk for prostate cancer in African Americans is greatest in younger men (and attenuates with older age). The same region was recently identified through linkage analysis of prostate cancer, followed by fine-mapping. We strongly replicated this association (P<4.2109) but find that the previously described alleles do not explain more than a fraction of the admixture signal. Thus, admixture mapping indicates a major, still-unidentified risk gene for prostate cancer at 8q24, motivating intense work to find it.
That's the abstract, and the latest that I can find from the senior author on prostate cancer.