Your Genes May Help You Avoid Lung Cancer

Ivanhoe Newswire) – Everyone knows your genes affect your looks, your health, and certain aspects of your personality. While people will sometimes curse their genes for a nose they don’t like or a high risk of diabetes, other genes can be beneficial. In fact, a recent study has found a variant in a gene linked with a decreased risk of lung cancer.

Researchers from the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, MD, discovered this gene variant after analyzing 1,429 variants in inflammation and immunity related genes from 378 patients with lung cancer and 450 healthy controls from the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian cancer screening trial.

The researchers then took the results of 81 single nucleotide polymorphisms, called SNPs, which showed a significant link to lung cancer and compared them to observed or imputed data from four recently completed genome-wide association studies.

The result was that one out of the 81 SNPs was associated with lung cancer in both analyses.

This SNP, named rs4648127, is located on the NFKB1 gene and is linked to a reduced risk of lung cancer; a 44 percent reduced risk in the cancer screening trial and a 21 percent reduced risk in the combined GWAS analysis.

This gene variant may decrease an individual’s risk of lung cancer because the NFKB1 produces, in part, the NF-KB protein which plays an important role in immunity and inflammation by regulating gene expression, cell death, and cell proliferation.

"Our study provides further evidence that inflammation may be associated with lung cancer risk," Meredith Shiels, Ph.D., M.H.S., from the National Cancer Institute was quoted as saying.

This helps physicians understand more about what puts a person at risk for lung cancer and possibly even what other factors may be associated with the disease.

Further research concerning the NFKB1 gene’s relationship to lung cancer risks is necessary, but the lucky people with this gene can rest easy, all thanks to their biology.

(Source: CANCER, October, 2012)