The tumor-suppressive TET enzymes, which are involved in DNA demethylation, are decreased in prostate cancer (PCa); in particular, TET2 is specifically targeted by androgen-dependent mechanisms of repression in PCa and may play a central role in carcinogenesis.
We perform fine-mapping of PCa risk across TET2 using genotypes from the PEGASUS case-control cohort and identify six new risk variants in introns 1 and 2.
This study provides evidence that rare variants in TET2 may help identify African American men at increased risk for clinically relevant prostate cancer.
A member of the ten-eleven translocation (TET) proteins, which catalyse the oxidation of methylated cytosine (5-mC) to 5-hmC, TET2, is repressed by androgens in PCa.
SNP rs7679673, ~6.3kb upstream of TET2 and previously reported to be associated with prostate cancer risk, was associated with endometrial cancer risk in the direction opposite to that for prostate cancer [meta-analysis odds ratio = 0.87 (per copy of the C allele), 95% confidence interval = 0.81, 0.93; P = 7.37×10(-5)] with no evidence of heterogeneity across studies (P heterogeneity = 0.66).
Among men carrying two A alleles at rs7679673 in TET2, the risk of prostate cancer associated with high aldrin use was 3.67 times those with no use (95% CI: 1.43, 9.41) (P-interaction= 0.006).