K. Suzuki et al., MICROSATELLITE INSTABILITY IN FEMALE NON-SMALL-CELL LUNG-CANCER PATIENTS WITH FAMILIAL CLUSTERING OF MALIGNANCY, British Journal of Cancer, 77(6), 1998, pp. 1003-1008
There is accumulating evidence of an increased risk of familial cluste
ring of cancer in the first-degree relatives of lung cancer probands.
However, no explanation has been proposed for these epidemiological da
ta. We reviewed 379 female non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients
to obtain their family histories of malignancy. Among them, nine fema
le NSCLC patients with three or more relatives diagnosed with malignan
cy and 28 control patients without a family history of malignancy were
selected to be analysed for instability at six different microsatelli
te loci. We observed microsatellite instability (MSI) more frequently
in the patients with three or more family histories of malignancy (six
out of nine, 67%) than the control patients (5 out of 28, 18%). The i
ncidence of MSI in the former was significantly higher than that in th
e control (P = 0.011: Fisher's exact test). We detected no significant
difference in clinicopathological characteristics between the cases w
ith MSI and those without MSI, except for their family histories of ca
ncer. Our results show that a significantly higher rate of MSI is asso
ciated with familial clustering of malignancy. MSI could be one of the
underlying mechanisms for familial clustering of malignancy in female
NSCLC patients.