Researchers find big batch of breast cancer genes:
The researchers, reporting in the journals Nature and Nature Genetics, said the discoveries are the most important genes associated with breast cancer since BRCA1 and BRCA2 were identified.Women with faulty copies of BRCA1 or BRCA2 have a 50 percent to 85 percent chance of getting breast cancer in their lifetimes. But they are rare genes, and only account for 5 percent to possibly 10 percent of breast cancer cases.
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David Hunter of Harvard University and a team at the U.S.
National Cancer Institute looked at more than 2,200 women of European ancestry.They found four common mutations in FGFR2 associated with the breast cancer in women after menopause who do not have known relatives with breast cancer.
The mutations raise the risk of breast cancer risk by 20 percent if they carry one copy of the gene and by 60 percent if they carry two copies. And close to 60 percent of the women they studied carried at least one copy.