Longkankergen komt meer voor bij niet-rokers dan bij rokers
Mutaties in het EGFR-gen, één van de twee genen die een belangrijke indicator zijn voor longkanker, komt bij niet-rokers met longkanker in 51% van de gevallen voor en bij rokers slechts in 10% van de gevallen. Dat is een resultaat dat gevonden werd in een onderzoek bij het University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
De onderzoekers merken op (!):
“The findings also suggest that something outside of exposure to secondhand smoke might be to blame for many of the lung cancers seen in nonsmokers.”
Researchers say they’ve identified two gene mutations key to the development of lung cancer, with one occuring more often in people who’ve never smoked.
Experts and physicians have long suspected that an individual smoker’s genes help determine who gets lung cancer. In this latest study of lung cancer patients from the United States, Japan, Taiwan and Australia, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center found that mutations in a specific domain of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene were more common in people who’d never smoked (51 percent) than in smokers (10 percent).
These mutations were also more common in cases of adenocarcinomas (40 percent) than in other forms of lung cancer (3 percent), in people of East Asian ancestry (30 percent) than in other ethnic groups (8 percent), and in females (42 percent) than in males (14 percent), they report.
A second gene mutation also predisposed individuals to lung cancer, but only in the absence of the EGFR mutation, they add. Mutations in a gene called KRAS occurred in 8 percent of lung cancers, but the variant was not found in any lung cancers that already had an EGFR mutation.
The findings “support the hypothesis that at least two distinct molecular pathways” determine the development of either the EGFR-type cancer, or the KRAS malignancy, the study authors wrote.
More Genetic Clues to Lung Cancer’s Cause
Washington Times vermeldt de meeroken-opmerking typisch genoeg niet
P.S. toen de anti-rook lobby begon in de jaren 80 zei Dr. Zeldenrust voor de TV:
Ik heb nog nooit aan een long kunnen zien of iemand rookt of niet rookt. Wél zie ik het verschil tussen een zieke en gezonde long.
Zeldenrust was patholoog-anatoom, hij had dus in zijn leven vele longen gezien.
