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Question: Is it true that different ethnicities are more likely to have cancer genes than others?
Asked by hughes1 to Leo on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: Your Research.Question: Is it true that different ethnicities are more likely to have cancer genes than others?
Comments
Marianne commented on :
Sorry to butt in!!
It’s certainly true.
One of my colleague’s recently studied breast cancer incidence in Tower Hamlets – a very ethnically diverse area of east London.
She found that black women are likely to develop breast cancer earlier than other groups and also that they were diagnosed at a later stage. This could be due to many factors; people of non-UK heritage often have traditional family/religious reasons for avoiding doctors, though this is to their detriment.
It seems that the different genetic backgrounds of people from different parts of the world really do affect cancer rates; some cancers are much more common in the West (UK/USA) than East Asia for example – another PhD student in my institute has been investigating the different chromosomal abnormalities in prostate cancer in UK vs. Chinese men.
Now people are moving around a lot more and ‘race’ isn’t really a real concept anyway, the variations are hard to define but certainly interesting, and by characterising people’s altered risk based on their family history, we are more likely to be able to provide people with suitable treatments that are effective and safe.