Asthma gene variants may cut risk of brain cancer, suggests Ohio research

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New York, July 17: New research suggests that gene variants, which are known to raise the risk of asthma, decrease the risk of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a common type of brain cancer that is rapidly fatal.

Variants or ‘polymorphisms’ are minor changes in a gene that can influence how often the associated protein is produced in a cell and how well it functions.

Several reports have linked asthma with a reduced risk of brain tumors, but the studies may have suffered from various design issues, lead author Dr Judith Schwartzbaum, from Ohio State University in Columbus, told Reuters. “So, to me, the evidence just wasn’t credible,” she said.

In the present study, Ms Schwartzbaum’s team looked for an association between asthma-related gene variants and GBM in a study of 111 patients with this tumor and 422 comparison subjects. An extensive literature search was conducted to identify variants that have been consistently linked to an increased or decreased risk of asthma.

In agreement with previous findings, self-reported asthma was associated with a decreased risk of GBM, the researchers noted in the journal Cancer Research.

Two variants were tied to a heightened risk of GBM, whereas another was associated with a reduced risk. As it turns out, the two former variants are known to decrease the risk of asthma, whereas the latter raises the risk.

“Now I’m interested in determining if these polymorphisms just happen to have independent roles in the two diseases or does having asthma or allergy symptoms reduce the risk of GBM,” Ms Schwartzbaum said.