Telomere Length as a Predictor of Aggressive Prostate Cancer

Abstract : We evaluated whether men with shorter telomere length in prostate cancer tissue and in normal appearing prostate tissue adjacent to adenocarcinoma have a higher risk of aggressive prostate cancer than men with longer telomere length. We included 663 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study who underwent radical prostatectomy and for whom tissue was obtained and arrayed on six tissue microarrays. We used FISH to conduct relative quantitation of telomere length in ~4000 digitally-imaged spots equating to ~40,000 records. For each man, we determined telomere length in normal stroma, normal epithelium (basal and luminal cells), cancer (luminal cells), high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (basal and luminal cells), normal stroma associated with cancer, and normal stroma associated with PIN. The data were entered into software developed at Hopkins called Telometer. We are in the data cleaning phase, will perform the statistical analysis over the next few months, and will submit an abstract to a national cancer meeting next year while concurrently preparing the manuscript.