Highlights of This Issue

Abstract

Overall breast cancer risk increases steadily beginning at about 30 years of age. To better understand the age-related gene expression changes in breast cancer, Pirone and colleagues used microarrays to characterize age-related gene expression patterns in normal breast tissue. The authors report significant associations between gene expression levels and age for over 800 probes. This study reveals breast cancer insights uncovered through the evaluation of normal breast tissue.Mean sojourn time (MST) measures the preclinical screen-detectable phase and represents how well a test can detect asymptomatic disease. For colorectal cancer screening tests, available MST estimates are associated with the older Hemoccult II tests. In this study, Zheng and Rutter present MST estimates for the newer Hemoccult SENSA tests. Using the newer tests, the authors found differences in MST relative to the location of the cancer in the colorectum. These results provide important information about the performance of Hemoccult SENSA tests as well as clues about colorectal cancer detection.A recent genome-wide association study identified a novel breast cancer susceptibility locus at 9q31.2 (rs865686). To further investigate the rs865686–breast cancer association, Warren and colleagues conducted a replication study within the Breast Cancer Association Consortium. This study provides additional strong evidence of an inverse association between rs865686 and breast cancer risk. In addition, the authors report that the strength of the breast cancer association decreased with increasing age at diagnosis.Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a malignancy of lymphocytes, and increasing evidence points to a role for genetic variation in immune genes in the non-Hodgkin lymphoma etiology. Cerhan and colleagues conducted a 2-stage analysis of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) from 1,253 genes using an immune and inflammation gene panel. The authors report that the TAP2 coding SNP rs241447 was strongly associated with follicular lymphoma and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma but not with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. In addition, higher TAP2 expression was associated with the risk allele in both follicular lymphoma and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma tumors. These results indicate that genetic variation in antigen presentation of HLA class I molecules may play a role in lymphomagenesis.