[Source: Cancer Research Institute UK] – US scientists have shown that a certain version of a gene called STG is linked to a two-fold increase in a person’s risk of developing a form of blood cancer called follicular lymphoma.
The disease accounts for up to 30 per cent of all cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, in which tumours develop in white blood cells called lymphocytes.
In follicular lymphoma, tumours arise in a particular type of white blood cell, called B-cells.
Studies like this are telling us more and more about the genetic aspect of cancer, including who is at increased risk of the disease.
Writing in the journal Nature Genetics, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) reveal that a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) – in other words, a single change within the more than three billion base pairs that make up the human genome – can affect a person’s susceptibility to the cancer.
For more information: Follicular lymphoma ‘twice as common’ in carriers of variant gene