[Christine MH-UK]

I wondered about this because I had a chest x-ray in my 20s to get a student visa for a country (it was a check for TB, even though I was in an area that didn't have a TB problem).

Recently, I ran across the study below which compared the traits of premenopausal breast cancers associated with Chernobyl and those in Western New York state. From this, it sounds like her2 neu negative cancers are more like those caused by radiation.

1: Br J Cancer. 2005 Sep 19;93(6):699-708.

Array comparative genomic hybridisation (aCGH) analysis of premenopausal breast cancers from a nuclear fallout area and matched cases from Western New York.

Varma G, Varma R, Huang H, Pryshchepava A, Groth J, Fleming D, Nowak NJ, McQuaid
D, Conroy J, Mahoney M, Moysich K, Falkner KL, Geradts J.

Department of Medicine, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY, USA.

High-resolution array comparative genomic hybridisation (aCGH) analysis of DNA copy number aberrations (CNAs) was performed on breast carcinomas in
premenopausal women from Western New York (WNY) and from Gomel, Belarus, an area exposed to fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. Genomic DNA was isolated from 47 frozen tumour specimens from 42 patients and hybridised to arrays spotted with more than 3000 BAC clones. In all, 20 samples were from WNY and 27 were from Belarus. In total, 34 samples were primary tumours and 13 were lymph node metastases, including five matched pairs from Gomel. The average number of total CNAs per sample was 76 (range 35-134). We identified 152 CNAs (92 gains and 60 losses) occurring in more than 10% of the samples. The most common amplifications included gains at 8q13.2 (49%), at 1p21.1 (36%), and at 8q24.21 (36%). The most common deletions were at 1p36.22 (26%), at 17p13.2 (26%), and at 8p23.3 (23%). Belarussian tumours had more amplifications and fewer deletions than WNY breast cancers. HER2/neu negativity and younger age
were also associated with a higher number of gains and fewer losses. In the five paired samples, we observed more discordant than concordant DNA changes.
Unsupervised hierarchical cluster analysis revealed two distinct groups of
tumours: one comprised predominantly of Belarussian carcinomas and the other
largely consisting of WNY cases. In total, 50 CNAs occurred significantly more
commonly in one cohort vs the other, and these included some candidate signature amplifications in the breast cancers in women exposed to significant radiation.
In conclusion, our high-density aCGH study has revealed a large number of
genetic aberrations in individual premenopausal breast cancer specimens, some of which had not been reported before. We identified a distinct CNA profile for carcinomas from a nuclear fallout area, suggesting a possible molecular fingerprint of radiation-associated breast cancer.

PMID: 16222315 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]