A large case–control study by international researchers has found that people who carry certain genetic risk factors for gastric cancer have a much greater risk if they have also been infected by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori.
The study could contribute to the development of tailored genomic medicine for treating stomach cancer, it is claimed.
The researchers evaluated the risk of gastric cancer in a large case–control study of Japanese people, considering whether they were carriers of pathogenic variants and whether they had been infected by H. pylori.
They analysed DNA samples from more than 11,000 patients with stomach cancer and 44,000 people without cancer for 27 genes associated with hereditary tumours.
Their analysis identified nine genes that were highly associated with the risk for stomach cancer.
Next, the researchers went on to analyse the interactions that took place between the pathogenic variants in the nine genes and patient history of H. pylori infection.
They found that the risk for gastric cancer was dramatically higher when a pathogenic variant was combined with H. pylori infection than when either factor was present alone.
Among the nine genes, four were of particular interest because they code for proteins that normally help repair damaged DNA.
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