BioMed Central Blog

Linking diet and hormone exposure to breast cancer risk

One-and-a-half million people worldwide were diagnosed with breast cancer last year. In the UK, it is the most common form of cancer. Many studies have tried to find the regions of the genome that are associated with breast cancer risk, yet so far only a small proportion of inherited cancers can be explained. A report in the latest issue of Genome Medicine identifies two genomic regions linked to breast cancer risk.

Ross Prentice and colleagues from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, combined environmental information (such as diet and history of hormone treatment) with genotype information for breast cancer, both obtained from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) clinical trial. They found that, by taking both types of information into account, the significance of certain mutations (single nucleotide polymorphisms) for postmenopausal breast cancer risk changed.

The team identified two genomic regions associated with risk of breast cancer: the fibroblast growth factor receptor two (FGFR2) and the mitochondrial ribosomal protein S30 (MRPS30) regions. These findings are likely to lead to further investigations of regions close to the MRPS30 and FGFR2 genes to understand the link between the effects of hormonal and dietary exposures and postmenopausal breast cancer risk. This approach of combining environmental and genotype information will aid the search for regions linked to increased risk of other diseases.

Posted by Maria Hodges at 15:59    Comments (0)