This large prospective case-control study obtained further support for an association between a seropositive status for antibodies against T vaginalis and the risk of prostate cancer, with statistically significant associations identified for the risk of extraprostatic prostate cancer and for clinically relevant, potentially lethal prostate cancer.

Purpose SPINK1 over-expression has been described in prostate cancer and is linked with poor prognosis in many cancers. The objective of this study was to characterize the association between SPINK1 over-expression and prostate cancer specific survival. Experimental Design The study included 879 participants in the US Physicians’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow–Up Study, diagnosed with prostate cancer (1983 – 2004) and treated by radical prostatectomy. Protein tumor expression of SPINK1 was evaluated by immunohistochemistry on tumor tissue microarrays. Results 74/879 (8%) prostate cancer tumors were SPINK1 positive. Immunohistochemical data was available for PTEN, p-Akt, pS6, stathmin, androgen receptor (AR) and ERG (as a measure of the TMPRSS2:ERG translocation). Compared to SPINK1 negative tumors, SPINK1 positive tumors showed higher PTEN and stathmin expression, and lower expression of AR (p<0.01). SPINK1 over-expression was seen in 47 of 427 (11%) ERG negative samples and in 19 of 427 (4%) ERG positive cases (p=0.0003). We found no significant associations between SPINK1 status and Gleason grade or tumor stage. There was no association between SPINK1 expression and biochemical recurrence (p=0.56). Moreover, there was no association between SPINK1 expression and prostate cancer mortality (there were 75 lethal cases of prostate cancer during a mean of 13.5 years follow-up [HR 0.71 (95% confidence interval 0.29–1.76)]). Conclusions Our results suggest that SPINK1 protein expression may not be a predictor of recurrence or lethal prostate cancer amongst men treated by radical prostatectomy. SPINK1 and ERG protein expression do not appear to be entirely mutually exclusive, as some previous studies have suggested.

BRCA1 functions as a tumor suppressor; recent work suggests that BRCA1 may also induce cell cycle arrest to allow for DNA repair. We hypothesized that BRCA1 expression in prostate tumor tissue may be associated with prostate cancer progression through regulation of the cell cycle. We used immunohistochemistry to evaluate BRCA1 protein expression in archival tumor samples from 393 prostate cancer cases in the Physicians' Health Study. The men were followed prospectively from diagnosis to development of metastases and mortality. Fifteen percent of tumors stained positive for BRCA1. BRCA1-positive tumors had substantially increased tumor proliferation index compared with negative tumors (47.0 Ki67-positive nuclei versus 10.3, P = 0.0016) and were more likely to develop lethal cancer compared with BRCA1-negative tumors (hazard ratio, 4.6; 95% confidence interval, 2.4-8.7). These findings strengthen the hypothesis that BRCA1 plays a role in cell cycle control and show that BRCA1 is a marker of clinical prostate cancer prognosis. Cancer Res; 70(8); 3136-9. ©2010 AACR.