Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2016 Jan 19;114(2):125-33.
doi: 10.1038/bjc.2015.439. Epub 2016 Jan 12.

Gene-environment interaction and risk of breast cancer

Anja Rudolph  1 , Jenny Chang-Claude  1   2 , Marjanka K Schmidt  3   4
Affiliations
Review

Gene-environment interaction and risk of breast cancer

Anja Rudolph et al. Br J Cancer. .

Abstract

Hereditary, genetic factors as well as lifestyle and environmental factors, for example, parity and body mass index, predict breast cancer development. Gene-environment interaction studies may help to identify subgroups of women at high-risk of breast cancer and can be leveraged to discover new genetic risk factors. A few interesting results in studies including over 30,000 breast cancer cases and healthy controls indicate that such interactions exist. Explorative gene-environment interaction studies aiming to identify new genetic or environmental factors are scarce and still underpowered. Gene-environment interactions might be stronger for rare genetic variants, but data are lacking. Ongoing initiatives to genotype larger sample sets in combination with comprehensive epidemiologic databases will provide further opportunities to study gene-environment interactions in breast cancer. However, based on the available evidence, we conclude that associations between the common genetic variants known today and breast cancer risk are only weakly modified by environmental factors, if at all.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Proportions of familial risk of breast cancer explained by hereditary variants.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Power for detecting gene–environment interaction given different allele frequencies. Power was calculated with Quanto 1.2.4, assuming a log-additive inheritance mode, a population prevalence of disease of 1%, an OR of 1.10 for the marginal association between SNP and disease, an OR of 1.20 for the marginal association between environmental factor and disease, a prevalence of the environmental factor of 0.15, a sample of 10 000 unmatched case–control pairs and an two-sided alpha of 5 × 10−6.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. (2013) Consortium launches genotyping effort. Cancer Discov 3(12): 1321–1322. - PubMed
    1. Aschard H, Chen J, Cornelis MC, Chibnik LB, Karlson EW, Kraft P (2012) Inclusion of gene-gene and gene-environment interactions unlikely to dramatically improve risk prediction for complex diseases. Am J Hum Genet 90(6): 962–972. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Barrdahl M, Canzian F, Joshi AD, Travis RC, Chang-Claude J, Auer PL, Gapstur SM, Gaudet M, Diver WR, Henderson BE, Haiman CA, Schumacher FR, Le Marchand L, Berg CD, Chanock SJ, Hoover RN, Rudolph A, Ziegler RG, Giles GG, Baglietto L, Severi G, Hankinson SE, Lindstrom S, Willet W, Hunter DJ, Buring JE, Lee IM, Zhang S, Dossus L, Cox DG, Khaw KT, Lund E, Naccarati A, Peeters PH, Quiros JR, Riboli E, Sund M, Trichopoulos D, Prentice RL, Kraft P, Kaaks R, Campa D (2014) Post-GWAS gene-environment interplay in breast cancer: results from the Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium and a meta-analysis on 79,000 women. Hum Mol Genet 23(19): 5260–5270. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Brohet RM, Goldgar DE, Easton DF, Antoniou AC, Andrieu N, Chang-Claude J, Peock S, Eeles RA, Cook M, Chu C, Nogues C, Lasset C, Berthet P, Meijers-Heijboer H, Gerdes AM, Olsson H, Caldes T, van Leeuwen FE, Rookus MA (2007) Oral contraceptives and breast cancer risk in the international BRCA1/2 carrier cohort study: a report from EMBRACE, GENEPSO, GEO-HEBON, and the IBCCS Collaborating Group. J Clin Oncol 25(25): 3831–3836. - PubMed
    1. Campa D, Kaaks R, Le Marchand L, Haiman CA, Travis RC, Berg CD, Buring JE, Chanock SJ, Diver WR, Dostal L, Fournier A, Hankinson SE, Henderson BE, Hoover RN, Isaacs C, Johansson M, Kolonel LN, Kraft P, Lee IM, McCarty CA, Overvad K, Panico S, Peeters PH, Riboli E, Sanchez MJ, Schumacher FR, Skeie G, Stram DO, Thun MJ, Trichopoulos D, Zhang S, Ziegler RG, Hunter DJ, Lindstrom S, Canzian F (2011) Interactions between genetic variants and breast cancer risk factors in the breast and prostate cancer cohort consortium. J Natl Cancer Inst 103(16): 1252–1263. - PMC - PubMed