Many men are very worried that they will get prostate cancer in the future after learning that their relatives have prostate cancer, so they are depressed all day long. This is a very important question. Will prostate cancer be hereditary or not? It is now recognized that heredity is a very important risk factor for the development of prostate cancer. If a person has a first-degree relative (father or brother) with prostate cancer, his or her risk of developing prostate cancer increases by more than a factor of one. If two or more first-degree relatives have prostate cancer, the person’s risk of developing prostate cancer increases 5-11 times, and the age of onset is about 7 years earlier than for those who do not have relatives with prostate cancer. The reason is that genetics is only one of the many risk factors for prostate cancer (no one can change their genetics), and as long as you do a good job of preventing other risk factors, and have regular medical checkups to improve your health awareness, you can minimize the damage caused by prostate cancer.