Study in CANCER says particular SNPs make people four times as likely to develop the disease.
Certain variations in DNA repair genes can affect a person’s odds of developing Hodgkin’s disease, report researchers at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
The investigators found that the alterations may modify the risk especially when interactions between the pathways are considered. People can be up to four times more likely to develop Hodgkin’s depending upon the specific variant or combination of variants.
To determine the potential role of the genetic variants the team evaluated the relationship between polymorphisms in five DNA repair genes (XPC, XPD, XPG, XRCC1, and XRCC3) in a population of 200 Hodgkin’s disease patients and 220 healthy individuals.
The five genes are involved in dissimilar pathways that repair DNA by performing different modifications to damaged DNA. Changes in these genes can change the make-up and structure of the proteins that carry out these repair processes and therefore could influence how well DNA repair is performed.
The article is published online March 9 in Cancer.
