Scientist Discover New DNA Regions Associated With Three New Cancers

Scientist in the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study, COGS, have recently discovered 74 possible DNA regions link with with breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer reported by LA Times.  They discovered 41 new breast cancer linkages, 3 new linked to ovarian cancer, 23 new linked to prostate cancer, and confirming many older genetic markers that were previously found .  It was done by looking at hundreds of thousand areas on the human genome from 250,000 people with and without cancer.  Though this research did not give the cure to cancer, but it did give better insight on who and how to screen people, new ways to study the diseases, and could lead to a way of treating these horrible diseases.

The hope is to pinpoint specific people with high risk of getting these diseases and to give scientist more insight on the identities of the individual genes that cause these diseases before it is too late to use the information to help cure others.  They found that risks associated with these mutations were about 10 to 20% than faced by the general population.  Professor Raju Kucherlapati said, " In prospective, more than half of  women who have the most dangerous mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 will develop breast cancer at some point in their lives". Also men who feel into the top 1% of risk ended up 5 times more at risk for prostate cancer then the rest of the men in the study.  The average rate of prostate cancer in American men is 16%.  So these newly found DNA regions will give more insight on who to screen for cancer and who to give additional screenings to so the cancer can be stopped before it  gets too bad or to stop useless removal of the potential infected areas.

Scientist have also been looking into small genetic changes called single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNP.  Using the SNP's people who are already at high risk because of family history can be told an even more accurate risk after a SNP is taken.  These SNP's could help in early detection of these, but a lot more research is need before this technology can be proven.

So even though there still in no cure for cancer these break through findings sure do help out in early detection and future findings of cancer.  More research can only help people with cancer and people who are at risk for cancer.

http://www.cogseu.org/