Cancer Is Not a 'Bad Luck' Disease

• Activity Number: 420
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: ENAR
• Author(s): Chi Zhang* and Sha Cao and Ying Xu
• Companies: University of Georgia and University of Georgia and University of Georgia
• Keywords: Cancer ; Gene expression data ; Cumulative risk ; Oxidative stress ; Environmental factors

Abstract

Recent article "Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions" raises a series of discussions about possible factors contributing to cancer life time risk. Here we carried out a meta-analysis approach on 57 gene expression data sets collected on real normal tissue samples of 14 tissue types from 22 different countries and correlate the molecular characteristics to the cumulative risk of the cancer types in each country. Biological characteristics such as oxidative stress level, which can reflect the tissue damage or abnormality, are predicted for each sample by our in house gene expression data based predictor and correlate to the cumulative risk of the cancer types by a mixed effect model. Our analysis reveals that the combination of environment, basal metabolic rate and oxidative stress provides statistically more plausible explanation of cancer risk.