Researchers at the Moffitt Cancer Center, with the help of various institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom have found that the genes involved in inflammation may have something to do with the predisposition for ovarian cancer. Chronic inflammation had already been known to increase the risk for certain cancers, ovarian cancer among them. Researches identified 27 genes involved in inflammation, and found the frequency of 162 single-nucleotide polymorphisms in DNA extracted from blood samples from patients with and without ovarian cancer. SNPs were observed to vary among the studies and, surprisingly, it was the women who had minor or uncommon alleles that were at lower risk for ovarian cancer. For example, variations in Interleukin 1 alpha and another gene, AloX5 that are both involved in inflammatory reactions and have been linked to diseases related to the inflammatory response, induce variations in the risk for this specific cancer. Thomas A. Sellers, director of the Moffitt institute, says that if these results can be confirmed, by treating chronic inflammation, the risk for ovarian cancer may be reduced. In 2011 alone 225,500 cases of ovarian cancer were diagnosed world-wide, and, although only about 10% of these has been linked to mutations in certain, discreet genes, the causes for ovarian cancer remain unexplained. Sellers adds “"the Il1A variant that was most strongly protective is carried by 30 percent of women in the study, so the impact at the population level is not trivial."
This is a good example of hypothesis based science: proposing a connection between inflammation and ovarian cancer and carrying out studies to prove (or disprove) the proposed hypothesis. However, the researchers here departed from discovery science, having made a hypothesis after having noticed a trend.
“Researchers find ovarian cancer risk related to inherited inflammation genes,” Biology News Net, February 7, 2012
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