You have good enzymes? How much damage cells of smokers with clear DNA can influence their risk of lung cancer.
although smoking has long been linked to lung cancer, only 10% of heavy smokers develop the disease. Why them? One factor may be the activity of DNA repair enzymes that can undo some of the damage caused by smoking. A new study finds that smokers with a powerful repair enzyme are much more likely to get lung cancer.
About 150,000 people die from lung cancer each year in the United States. Many cases dates back to smoking, which causes the DNA in lung cells mutate at a high rate. Because the enzymes can solve this type of damage, repair the DNA scientist Zvi Livneh of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues wondered if the enzymes could be defective in smokers who develop cancer lung.
To find out, Livneh team looked for a common DNA repair enzyme called OGG1, in the blood of 68 patients with non-small cell lung cancer and 68 healthy individuals ; both groups included smokers and nonsmokers. The researchers extracted OGG1 from blood samples and DNA was added that they synthesized in the laboratory. The DNA samples carried the kind of damage that smoking causes.
OGG1 was less active than normal in 41% of cancer patients and 4% of healthy participants, they report September 3 Journal of the National Cancer Institute . Smoking with slow OGG1 were 10 times more likely to have lung cancer than those whose enzyme normally works and 0 times more likely than nonsmokers with normal enzyme activity. Nonsmokers with bad OGG1 were 10 times more likely to have cancer. This suggests that the reduced OGG1 activity could be lung cancer risk factor in the general population -. Not only in smokers
The results are "novel" and "significant", said Samuel Wilson, a biochemist at the National Institute of Sciences of Environmental Health. He added that if the findings hold, they could lead to earlier detection and prevention of lung cancer.
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Zvi Livneh
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