| Summary: | The primary aim of this thesis was to identify genetic factors that are important in the etiology of prostate and testicular cancer in the Icelandic population. This was done by studying genetic epidemiology, genomic instability, and performing genome-wide linkage and allelic-association analysis. The result of genetic linkage analysis in Icelandic pedigrees did not support evidence for susceptibility loci that were previously reported for either prostate or testicular cancer in other populations, although some novel suggestive linkage peaks were identified. The distribution of genomic imbalance, as evaluated by microsatellite marker comparison of normal and tumor material, did not suggest a relationship between the linkage results and somatic genomic instability in the testicular tumor genome or selected candidate regions in prostate cancer. In texticular cancer, a rare haplotype was identified at chromosome 15q12-q13.3 that may confer up to five-fold risk of the disease and explain 10% of cases. Since the results are based on the analysis of a relative few number of cases (N=135)and pedigrees (N=12 to 36), they need to be further validated in a larger independent case-control series.
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