Breast Cancer Res Treat 2008; 109: 101-111
Jump to full article: MedWire News (uk), 2008-04-29
Author: Andrew Czyzewski
Intro: Cigarette smoke exposure substantially increases the risk for developing breast cancer among premenopausal women with certain polymorphisms in interleukin 6 (IL6) and estrogen receptor alpha (ESR1), results of a case-control study demonstrate.
The findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that genotype and cigarette smoke can interact to increase the risk for breast cancer. One study recently reported by MedWire News found that smokers with the slow-metabolizing N-acetyltransferase 2 genotype face an increased risk for the disease compared with non-smokers.
For the present study, Martha Slattery (University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA) and colleagues enrolled 3128 non-Hispanic White women, including 1527 with breast cancer and 1601 controls, along with 798 cases and 924 controls of Hispanic/American Indian ethnicity. . . .
Notably, exposure to more than 10 hours of passive smoke per week was associated with a 3.0- and 4.4-fold increased breast cancer risk in Hispanic/American Indian and non-Hispanic White premenopausal GG rs2069832 carriers, respectively, compared with women with the wild-type genotype who reported less than 1 hour of exposure.
In addition women of either ethnicity group who smoked more than 15 cigarette pack-years and had the ESR1 Xba1 AA genotype faced a 3-fold increased risk for breast cancer compared with nonsmokers with the wild-type allele.
"Our data suggest that this risk may be influenced by underlying genetic susceptibility and that mechanisms involving both estrogen and inflammation may be important in defining risk," Slattery and colleagues conclude in the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment.
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