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.
The early incidence before 72 and equal incidence beyond 72 is consistent with what we're both saying, which is that the issue is early presentation and its correlation with aggressiveness. I have a feeling the next five years is going to produce an assay of some sort that will permit a clear assessment of the aggressiveness of the disease, and thus eliminate the situation where the public health impact of treating those who could have gone untreated is more negative than the impact of not treating those who treatment might have helped.
Ploidy analysis is claimed to be able to make the differentiation right now, but I have my doubts. It's also iffy to do from a core.
Thanks for posting on the topic. It's an important one for a lot of the participants here, and deserves all the exposure it can get.