Highlights of This Issue Free

Toth and colleagues used a subsets (ASSET) meta-analytic approach, to investigate associations of genetic variants related to epigenetic mechanisms with risks of breast, lung, colorectal, ovarian and prostate carcinomas. Among 162,887 imputed or genotyped variants in 555 candidate genes, SNPs in eight genes were associated with risk of more than one cancer type. Variants in BABAM1 were confirmed as a susceptibility locus for squamous cell lung, overall breast, ER-negative breast, overall prostate, overall and serous ovarian cancer. DPF1 rs12611084 was inversely associated with ER-negative breast, endometrioid ovarian, overall and aggressive prostate cancer risk. Functional and correlative studies are now needed to elucidate the potential links between germline genotype, epigenetic function, and cancer etiology.

Lee and colleagues investigated the relationship between nut consumption and lung cancer in the Environment And Genetics in Lung cancer Etiology (EAGLE) study and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) Diet and Health Study. The study found higher frequency of intake of nut consumption was inversely associated with overall lung cancer risk and associations were independent of cigarette smoking and other known risk factors.

Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS) is associated with germline TP53 mutations and a very high lifetime cancer risk. Algorithms that assess a patient's risk of inherited cancer predisposition are ofta model en used in clinical counseling. Existing LFS criteria have limitations. Peng and colleagues present a Mendelian model, LFSPRO, which estimates TP53 mutation probability through the Elston-Stewart algorithm, and consequently estimates future risk of cancer. LFSPRO accurately predicted TP53 mutation carriers in a pediatric sarcoma cohort from MD Anderson Cancer Center. LFSPRO is more broadly applicable than the current clinical criteria and may improve clinical management for individuals and families with LFS.

Men of African descent experience a disproportionately high prostate cancer mortality and studies have shown that prostate tumors in African-American (AA) patients harbor a distinct immune and inflammation signature when compared with European-American (EA) patients. Smith and colleagues examined the relationship between aspirin use and prostate cancer in the NCI-Maryland Prostate Cancer Case-Control Study consisting of men with incident prostate cancer and population-based men without the disease diagnosis. The authors report a significant inverse association between regular aspirin use and prostate cancer among AA men. Regular aspirin use before and after a prostate cancer diagnosis may prevent the development of aggressive disease in AA men who are at risk of a lethal malignancy.