ABSENCE OF EPSTEIN-BARR-VIRUS EBER-1 TRANSCRIPTS IN AN EPIDEMIOLOGICALLY DIVERSE GROUP OF BREAST CANCERS

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a ubiquitous herpesvirus associated with cer tain lymphomas and carcinomas, has been identified within the malignan t cells of a small proportion of breast tumors. As breast cancer is a very common malignancy in women, a pathogenetic role of EBV for even a subgroup of patients could have important implications for etiology a nd prevention. Therefore, we attempted to confirm the EBV-breast cance r association by exploring it in a representative case series stratifi ed by characteristics that modify breast cancer risk. We studied a sam ple of 97 female and 28 male patients identified from a US population- based cancer registry. Patients were selected randomly within age, sex , ethnicity and tumor estrogen-receptor status groups. With their arch ived tumor tissues, we examined EBV presence using in situ hybridizati on far the EBER-I transcript. In the 107 technically adequate specimen s, we did not detect this viral transcript in any tumors, including on e from a woman who also had an EBER-positive nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Our uniformly negative findings are extremely unlikely to have occurr ed by chance and cannot be attributed to selective sampling, as our st udy group included persons at diverse risk for breast cancer. We concl ude that the EBV EBER-I transcript is not commonly expressed in breast cancer, based on a broadly representative case series, though we cann ot exclude an association of EBV within a particular population subgro up. (C) 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.