A team of American researchers discovered that half of all cases of prostate cancer can be linked to five specific genes in the sufferers’ bodies. Researchers said that this discovery is “significant” and is likely to help medics and other scientists to better understand this disease. On the other hand, their findings are very important because from now on a simple blood test can identify the prostate cancer genes, so that men would find out their bent for this disease.

According to the researchers’ study, men having four of those five genes were 4.5 times more likely to suffer from prostate cancer than those who had none of the five genes. For the ones who had them all, as well as a family history of prostate cancer, the risk to suffer from this disease appeared to be 9.5 times greater.

The team of scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and Wake Forest University in North Carolina tested the blood of 2,893 Swedish prostate cancer sufferers and of 1,781 men without the disease and uncovered 16 small changes in the genetic code that were more common to prostate cancer sufferers. Researchers created then the SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) test, which is a test that uses the most common of the changes. Thus, men with four or more of these SNPs appeared to be almost 4.5 times more prone prostate cancer than others.

"Our finding provides an opportunity to supplement the well-established risk factors by looking at how many of these variants a man has inherited," Dr. Jianfeng Xu of Wake Forest University said in statement.