Singapore, April 14, 2008: According to a new study, specific variations within two genes involved with alcohol metabolism are associated with an increased risk for breast cancer in postmenopausal women.

 

The work, conducted by research groups led by Dr Peter Shields, professor of medicine and oncology at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center and Dr Jo Freudenheim, chair of social and preventive medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo, indicates that sequence variations within the genes ADH1B and ADH1C may as much as double a postmenopausal woman drinker's risk for breast cancer.

 

Dr Catalin Marian, a research instructor of cancer genetics and epidemiology at Georgetown said, we found that variations in two genes coding for the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme increase the risk of breast cancer among women who drink. The higher their alcohol consumption, the higher their risk.

 

The research team analyzed DNA samples taken from 991 women with breast cancer and 1,698 controls. They found that variations within the DNA sequences rs1042026 in the gene ADH1B and rs1614972 in the gene ADH1C were associated with an increased breast cancer risk for postmenopausal women. Within the rs1042026 sequence, the risk of breast cancer for women who had a variant form of the gene and who drank alcohol was nearly twice that of women who abstained.

 

Within the rs1614972 sequence, the variant form of the gene offered a protective effect against breast cancer that varied inversely proportional with the drinking level. The more alcohol women drank, the less protective the effect and the higher their risk of developing breast cancer.