Virus linked to aggressive breast cancer
Reuters Story - August 17, 1999 17:54
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By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Aug 17 (Reuters) - The virus that causes glandular fever, also known as "kissing disease," may also play a role in many cases of breast cancer, European researchers said on Tuesday.
They said they found Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in the tumors of about half of all the women with breast cancer they examined.
Irene Joab and colleagues at France's medical research institute INSERM, as well as a team in Germany, looked at 100 tissue samples taken from women with breast cancer.
In 30 cases they compared tumor tissue to tissue from healthy cells nearby.
Genetic material from the virus was found in 51 of the 100 samples, and only three of the comparative samples of healthy tissue contained the virus.
"Our results show the presence of EBV genome in a large subset of breast cancers," Joab's team wrote in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
"Because it is more frequently associated with the most aggressive tumors, EBV may play a role in their development."
Dr. Ian Magrath and Kishor Bhatia of the National Cancer Institute said just about everyone is infected with EBV.
"At least 90 percent of the world's adult population, including people in the most remote corners of the world, are infected by the virus," they wrote in a commentary on the study.
Normally it is harmless, not even causing mononucleosis -- the blood infection also known as glandular fever.
"However, even the best of marriages have their ups and downs and EBV has been impugned in the causation of many serious illnesses, including malignant neoplasms (cancer), albeit in a tiny fraction of the population," they wrote.
The virus was discovered because of its role in Burkitt's lymphoma, a form of cancer. It has also been associated with another kind of lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease, as well as stomach cancer.
The virus infects immune cells known as B lymphocytes and, like all other viruses, stays in the body forever.
But Magrath and Bhatia warned that finding bits of the virus in tumor cells does not mean it caused the cancer. They said it could be the virus can move into cells that are already damaged in some way, or might be drawn to cancerous cells. "If the virus were causative one would suspect that you would find the viral genome in every cell," Bhatia, a specialist in EBV, said in a telephone interview.
Bhatia said that in the case of Burkitt's lymphoma, the virus is found in every single tumor cell.
And he noted that five other studies have found no connection between the Epstein-Barr virus and breast cancer.
"This is quite a preliminary finding," Bhatia said. "It is something that has to be treated with tremendous caution. All it does is open the door and suggest that one should walk into this room and check this out."
But if it were shown to cause breast cancer "there would be strong grounds for speeding up efforts to develop an EBV vaccine, since breast cancer is the most common tumor of women worldwide, with approximately 800,000 new cases per year," Bhatia and Magrath wrote.
A second study in the same journal found gene mutations that might make breast cancer more likely to spread.
Peter O'Connell and colleagues at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio looked at tissue from 76 breast cancer patients and found that genetic damage at two sites was more common in those whose cancer had spread |
