Recently, HOXB13 has been established as a prostate cancer susceptibility gene in North America, with a relative risk associated with a single missense mutation of about 20. Ewing et al., sequenced over 200 genes in a prostate cancer linkage region at 17q21-22 among 94 probands of prostate cancer families, and found a recurrent mutation in the HOXB13 gene (G84E) in four families. The mutation co-segregated with prostate cancer. The geographical and ethnic extent of this founder allele has not yet been determined. We assayed for the presence of the G84E mutation in 3515 prostate cancer patients and 2604 controls from Poland. The G84E mutation predisposes to prostate cancer in Poland. We expect that the G84E founder mutation might be present in other Slavic populations.
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
