Y. Takagi et al., DISTINCT MUTATIONAL SPECTRUM OF THE P53 GENE IN LUNG CANCERS FROM CHINESE WOMEN IN HONG-KONG, Cancer research, 55(22), 1995, pp. 5354-5357
Accumulating evidence suggests that the p53 gene is a good target for
molecular epidemiological studies to search for risk factors in carcin
ogenic events, The lung cancer incidence for females in Hong Kong is u
nusually high, ranking among the highest in the world despite a low pe
rcentage with a history of smoking, To gain insights into possible eti
ological risk factors responsible for this high incidence, we examined
p53 mutations in 35 lung cancer specimens from Chinese females living
in Hong Kong and compared them with 35 matched cases from Japanese wo
men as well as previously reported p53 mutations in the world literatu
re, p53 mutations in exons 5-8 were present in 20 and 31% of the Hong
Kong and Japanese cases, respectively, Notably, single-base deletions
within runs of identical bases were observed in 3 (43%) of the 7 mutat
ions in the Hong Kong cases, in contrast to the absence of such mutati
ons in the controls and the extreme scarcity in the literature, sugges
ting that distinct environmental and/or genetic factor(s) might be inv
olved. Although the frequent occurrence of characteristic single-base
deletions could be a reflection of mutator mutations leading to ineffi
cient mismatch repair of slipped strand mispairings, none of the lung
cancer specimens exhibited such microsatellite instabilities.