Researchers from Brown University and the University of California San Francisco have said that epigenetic changes to DNA in breast cancers are directly linked with diet, alcohol, and tumour size, and could hence give a glimpse of the severity of the disease.
The findings point to the emergence of new biomarkers that researchers hope will give a more detailed view of the environmental factors that contribute to tumour development and could, in the future, provide improvements in diagnostics and treatment decisions, as well as potentially more personalized recommendations to help prevent recurrence.
The use of epigenetic profiles as biomarkers of disease subtype and severity is a rapidly emerging field with other notable contributions from this group- a field that is being advanced with the support of the NIH, and shows promise for developing novel clinical tools.
"We undertook this study to help illuminate how diet and environmental factors might contribute to differences observed among breast cancers," said Brock Christensen of the Center for Environmental Health and Technology (CEHT) at Brown University and lead author of the report.
The study measured epigenetic profiles in stage I to IV breast tumors from 162 women enrolled in the Pathways Study, a study of breast cancer survivorship based at Kaiser Permanente of Northern California.
The researchers took a detailed assessment of an individual's demographic and dietary information, as well as breast cancer tumour characteristics.
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