Targeting inflammatory pathways for prevention and therapy of cancer: short-term friend, long-term foe.

Chronic infections, obesity, alcohol, tobacco, radiation, environmental pollutants, and high-calorie diet have been recognized as major risk factors for the most common types of cancer. All these risk factors are linked to cancer through inflammation. Although acute inflammation that persists for short-term mediates host defense against infections, chronic inflammation that lasts for long term can predispose the host to various chronic illnesses, including cancer.

Hereditary breast/ovarian cancer: clinicopathological characteristics and survival of BRCA2 positive and negative cases.

The clinical and pathological characteristics and prognostic outcome of patients with hereditary breast/ovarian cancer and BRCA2 mutations are poorly known. Hence, the present study aimed to correlate the BRCA2 mutation status with clinical characteristics and overall survival of 102 breast/ovarian cancer patients in Kerala, South India. All the coding regions of BRCA2 genes were PCR amplified and analyzed for mutations employing Conformation Sensitive Gel Electrophoresis and characterized by sequencing.

Prognostic importance of DNA repair gene polymorphisms of XRCC1 Arg399Gln and XPD Lys751Gln in lung cancer patients from India.

Purpose: Inter individual variation in lung cancer susceptibility may be modulated in part through genetic polymorphisms in the DNA repair genes, especially the genes involved in the Base Excision Repair (BER) and nucleotide excision repair (NER) pathway. Two of the genetic polymorphisms, XRCC1Arg399Gln and XPD Lys751Gln have been extensively studied in the association with lung cancer risk, although published studies have been inconclusive.

Methods: In order to verify the role of the common variant alleles in the XPD gene, we have genotyped 211 lung cancer patients and 211 healthy controls using PCR-RFLP assays in a hospital based, case-control study in an Indian population.