The WECARE (women’s environment cancer and radiation exposure) multicenter study, supported by NCI/NIH, US.

The objective of this study is to investigate gene-environment interactions influencing susceptibility in the etiology of breast cancer. A repository of epidemiologic risk factor information and biologic specimens from 700 women with asynchronous bilateral breast cancer and 1400 women with unilateral breast cancer ascertained through 5 population-based tumor registries in the US and Denmark are under collection. All subjects are interviewed using a structured questionnaire and blood samples collected for genetic analyses. In the initial study the interaction of radiation exposure and variation in the ATM gene is studied. Ionizing radiation is known to be a breast carcinogen and recent studies suggest that certain variants of the ATM gene may increase susceptibility to radiation-induced breast cancer. Our hypothesis is that women who are gene carriers of variants with impaired function and who have received radiation therapy as part of breast conservation treatment, are at especially high risk of developing second primary contralateral breast cancer. The ATM gene is screened for all type of mutations/variations using DHPLC

The people involved from our group: Laila Jansen and Phoung Vu.

Se also http://146.203.34.23/atmstudy/front.html for the collaborating groups in this project.