8 Percent Of Children With Cancer Carry Genetic Predisposition, Experts Say

More than 8 percent of children with cancer may carry a genetic predisposition to it, experts say.

Researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and Washington University in St. Louis examined the genes of 1,120 pediatric cancer patients--showing that 8.5 percent of them carried mutated genes that had been passed-down, despite no family history of cancer. The implications of the study are incredibly significant, as these mutations may also put other family members at risk.

Researchers found mutations in gene TP53, which normally works to suppress tumor formation, according to study author, Richard K. Wilson, Ph.D., director of the McDonnell Genome Institute at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. They also found mutated genes often seen in inherited colon and breast cancers, known as APC and BRCA2, as well as NF1 and RB1, bone cancer and melanoma.

What makes pediatric cancers so much of a mystery is that, unlike adult cancers that are the result of mutations that form over a lifetime, there's not seemingly enough time to exacerbate such DNA errors that might prompt cancer growth.

"We all experience mutations as we age," Wilson told Science World Report (SWR), noting that most are harmless or "repaired" by normal cellular mechanisms. "However, some will occur, persist and work in concert with other mutations to cause cancer. So it's always been a bit puzzling as to why children get cancer when they shouldn't have lived long enough to acquire several mutations in their genomes. So we expect that many of these kids are born with some cancer-causing mutations already in their genomes."

Researchers are hopeful that the findings will lead to new approaches in testing children--specifically through comprehensive genomic screening on pediatric patients without a family history of cancer.

"The aim of genomic screening is to identify genetic variants that can change the way we treat an individual," Dr. Jaime Vengoechea, told (SWR), a geneticist at Emory University who was not involved with the research. "In this case, the main objective is to identify whether a child with cancer has a change in his or her DNA that would indicate a future risk of other cancers for that child, and a higher risk for cancer in his or her relatives."
 
The research is published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

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