Thursday, June 28, 2007

Genome-wide association study for breast cancer susceptibility   posted by p-ter @ 6/28/2007 08:42:00 PM
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Another genome-wide association study:
Breast cancer exhibits familial aggregation, consistent with variation in genetic susceptibility to the disease. Known susceptibility genes account for less than 25% of the familial risk of breast cancer, and the residual genetic variance is likely to be due to variants conferring more moderate risks. To identify further susceptibility alleles, we conducted a two-stage genome-wide association study in 4,398 breast cancer cases and 4,316 controls, followed by a third stage in which 30 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were tested for confirmation in 21,860 cases and 22,578 controls [!!!] from 22 studies... SNPs in five novel independent loci exhibited strong and consistent evidence of association with breast cancer (P < 10-7). Four of these contain plausible causative genes (FGFR2, TNRC9, MAP3K1 and LSP1).
These alleles are of small effect and in areas of the genome about which little is known, again showing that genome-wide association studies are a powerful way of opening up research into novel biology.

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