Browsing by Author "Aho, Niina"

Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer in women worldwide and in 2020 it was the fifth deadliest. In Finland 2019 more than 5000 breast cancer cases were diagnosed, 94% in women and 6% in men. Until now, the high-risk breast cancer susceptibility genes have been identified including BRCA1, BRCA2 and TP53 as well as many of the moderate risk genes. Still, together all the identified genes explain only approximately half of the familial breast cancer cases. Furthermore, all the known breast cancer susceptibility genes are linked to the DNA repair mechanism. Serpina3 stands out as a non-DNA repair gene but as a gene that encodes a protease inhibitor which belongs to the serpin superfamily. Serpina3 has been associated with various diseases before and especially changes in its expression levels are linked to the tumor prognosis in many cancers including breast cancer. However, a previous study proposed that Serpina3 c.918-1G>C is a susceptibility variant for breast cancer in the Northern Finland population. This thesis a case-control study to investigate whether Serpina3 c.918-1G>C variant is associated with breast cancer in the Southern Finland population. In addition, the tumor histology and cellular markers of Serpina3 c.918-1G>C carriers were examined. This study utilized DNA collected from breast cancer patients as well as DNA from blood donors and healthy biobank controls. Breast cancer patients included both familial and unselected cases. The prevalence of Serpina3 c.918- 1G<C variant was studied by genotyping the cases and controls. Genotyping was done by TaqMan real-time PCR and carriers were further confirmed by Sanger sequencing. Moreover, statistical tests were used in the data analyses. The studied Serpina3 c.918-1G>C variant was not found to be significantly (p>0.05) enriched in the breast cancer cases. The variant was found in 0.23 % of familial and 0.36 % of unselected cases, altogether in 0.28 % of all studied breast cancer cases, the frequency in controls was 0.27 %. The tumor histology was found to be ductal in 73 % of the Serpina3 c.918- 1G>C variant carriers and only 9 % had lobular tumor. In other words, the tumor histology followed the usual distribution. All the carriers had a HER2 negative tumor and all except one case were both ER and PR positive. About half of the carriers expressed the cellular proliferation marker Ki67. As a conclusion, the results from this study do not suggest Serpina3 c.918-1G>C as a breast cancer risk variant at least in the Southern Finland population.