Blood arsenic levels and the risk of familial breast cancer in Poland.

Wojciech Marciniak,Anna Jakubowska,Katherine Pullella,Magdalena Muszyńska,Oleg Oszurek,Tadeusz Dębniak,Joanne Kotsopoulos,Ping Sun,Steven A Narod,Róża Derkacz,Michał Falco,Piotr Baszuk,Jacek Gronwald,Cezary Cybulski,Tomasz Huzarski,Jan Lubiński,Marcin Lener

doi:10.1002/ijc.32595

Abstract

Arsenic is recognized as a potent carcinogen at high concentrations, but the relationship between environmental arsenic and breast cancer risk has not well been studied. Most research has focused on the effect of arsenic in populations with high endemic exposure, and not in populations with arsenic levels within normal limits. We sought to determine if blood arsenic levels predict the risk of breast and other cancers risk among women in northern Poland. The cohort consisted of 1,702 healthy women, aged 40 and above, identified between 2010 and 2017. Blood arsenic level was determined by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. After an average of 4.5 years of follow‐up (range 0.7–7.3 years), there were 110 incident cases of cancer diagnosed in the cohort, including 68 cases of breast cancer. Women in the highest quartile of arsenic had a highly significant 13‐fold increased risk of developing breast cancer, compared to women in the lowest quartile (hazard ratio [HR] = 13.2; 95% confidence interval [CI] 4.02–43.0). Results were similar for arsenic and all incident cancers (HR quartile 4 vs. quartile 1 = 13.3; 95% CI 4.78–37.0). If confirmed, our study suggests that the blood arsenic level may be a useful predictive marker of cancer risk in women.

Highlights

The lifetime risk of breast cancer among women in Poland is approximately 6% and efforts are underway to better individualize risk, that is, to identify factors that allow us to stratify womenOver the past 50 years, there has been considerable attention paid to various measures of diet and breast cancer risk in prospective studies.[3]
If confirmed in further studies, these results suggests that blood arsenic level may be a useful predictive marker of cancer risk in women
We prospectively evaluated the relationship between total blood arsenic and breast cancer risk in this cohort of 1,700 women with a family history of the disease but no inherited BRCA1 mutation

Summary

Introduction

The lifetime risk of breast cancer among women in Poland is approximately 6% and efforts are underway to better individualize risk, that is, to identify factors that allow us to stratify women. Over the past 50 years, there has been considerable attention paid to various measures of diet and breast cancer risk in prospective studies.[3]. In Poland, we are constructing a biomarker resource bank, along with a companion clinical database, which will eventually contain information on 7,000 women who have received genetic counseling at our institution (Pomeranian Medical University) because of a family history of breast cancer. The database will include 2,000 women with a BRCA1 mutation and 5,000 women who do not have a BRCA1 mutation. Study participants are cancer-free at inception and are followed prospectively to identify new cases of cancer.

Methods

Results

Conclusion