Epigenome-wide association study of prostate cancer in African americans identifies DNA methylation biomarkers for aggressive disease

DNA methylation plays important roles in prostate cancer (PCa) development and pro-gression. African American men have higher incidence and mortality rates of PCa than other racial groups in U.S. The goal of this study was to identify differentially methylated CpG sites and genes between clinically defined aggressive and nonaggressive PCa in African Americans. We performed genome-wide DNA methylation profiling in leukocyte DNA from 280 African American PCa patients using Illumina MethylationEPIC array that contains about 860K CpG sties. There was a slight increase of overall methylation level (mean β value) with the increasing Gleason scores (GS = 6, GS = 7, GS ≥ 8, P for trend = 0.002). There were 78 differentially methylated CpG sites with P < 10⁻⁴ and 9 sites with P < 10⁻⁵ in the trend test. We also found 77 differentially methylated regions/genes (DMRs), including 10 homeobox genes and six zinc finger protein genes. A gene ontology (GO) molecular pathway enrichment analysis of these 77 DMRs found that the main enriched pathway was DNA-binding transcriptional factor activity. A few representative DMRs include HOXD8, SOX11, ZNF-471, and ZNF-577. Our study suggests that leukocyte DNA methylation may be valuable biomarkers for aggressive PCa and the identified differentially methylated genes provide biological insights into the modulation of immune response by aggressive PCa.