An international research collaboration led by UC San Francisco researchers has identified a genetic variant common in Latina women that protects against breast cancer.<\/p>\n
The variant, a difference in just one of the three billion \u201cletters\u201d in the human genome known as a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), originates from indigenous Americans and confers significant protection from breast cancer, particularly the more aggressive oestrogen receptor\u2013negative forms of the disease, which generally have a worse prognosis.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe effect is quite significant,\u201d said Elad Ziv, MD, professor of medicine and senior author of the study. \u201cIf you have one copy of this variant, which is the case for approximately 20 percent of U.S. Latinas, you are about 40 percent less likely to have breast cancer. If you have two copies, which occurs in approximately 1 percent of the US Latina population, the reduction in risk is on the order of 80 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new study showed that women who carry the variant have breast tissue that appears less dense on mammograms. High \u201cmammographic density\u201d is a known risk factor for breast cancer.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have detected something that is definitely relevant to the health of Latinas, who represent a large percentage of the population in California, and of other states such as Texas,\u201d said first author Laura Fejerman, PhD, assistant professor of medicine and a member of UCSF\u2019s Institute of Human Genetics. \u201cThis work was done as a collaboration of multiple investigators, many of us originally from Latin America. As a Latina myself, I am gratified that there are representatives of that population directly involved in research that concerns them.\u201d\nUniversity of California \u2013 San Francisco<\/link>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An international research collaboration led by UC San Francisco researchers has identified a genetic variant common in Latina women that protects against breast cancer. The variant, a difference in just one of the three billion \u201cletters\u201d in the human genome known as a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), originates from indigenous Americans and confers significant protection from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}