Tag: Breast

Eating too much fat in pregnancy may be an indulgence that has a less-than-beneficial effect on generations to come, say researchers at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. Their unique study in rats shows that pregnant females that ate a high fat diet not only increased breast cancer risk in their female daughters but also in that daughter's offspring -- the "granddaughters."

ScienceDaily (Dec. 23, 2009) The first detailed search of breast cancer genomes to uncover genomic rearrangements is published December 23. The team characterised the ways in which the human genome is broken and put back together in 24 cases of breast cancer.

Rearrangements involve reshuffling and reorganisation of the genome and include deletions, duplications and novel juxtaposition of DNA sequences. The study shows that breast cancer samples can differ greatly in the extent to which they are subject to genomic rearrangements: some are relatively undisturbed whereas others are fractured extensively and then reassembled with more than 200 rearrangements present.