Identified three new genetic factors that predispose to bladder cancer

Researchers from the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL), Research Institute of Hospital del Mar, the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and U.S. National Cancer Institute have identified three new genetic factors predisposing to cancer urinary bladder.

In addition, this study confirms six additional genetic factors that were previously discovered. Some genes involved in this study, genome-wide association (GWAS), including three genes metabolizing carcinogens in tobacco, and two of them modify the risk associated with tobacco habit.

CREAL co-director, Dr Manolis Kogevinas, is one of the researchers who worked on this research, which involved 12,000 patients with bladder cancer, and coordinator of Epicuro, Spanish study of bladder cancer in which they were based and which is still working.

These findings open up new lines of research to understand the biological mechanisms that measure these associations with cancer risk. In fact, according to the researchers, these findings will help understand the origins of bladder cancer and can thus take preventive measures of this disease as early as possible.

With the discovery of susceptibility factors in the future may be possible to identify those most at risk of developing this disease, or possibly at high risk of relapse after diagnosis and treatment.

It added that bladder cancer is a health problem with high health care costs in the Western world. Furthermore, this disease is a paradigm of the effect of gene-environment interactions. In Spain, this is a common cancer in men, ranking fourth, after lung, prostate and colorectal.

Reference: A multi-stage genome-wide association study of bladder cancer identifies several new susceptibility loci. Rothman N, et al. Nature Genetics, Nov 2010.
 

Photography: Pablo Porlan