Article Text
Abstract
Background Germline mutation in BRCA1 and BRCA2 (BRCA) is genetic predisposition for breast and ovarian cancer. Identification of mutation carriers is a critical step to prevent and treat the cancer in the mutation carriers. Human BRCA variation has been well determined as ethnic-specific by studies in Ashkenazi Jewish, Polish and Icelandic populations in the 1990s. However, sufficient evidence is lacking to determine if ethnic-specific BRCA variation is also present in Asia population, which is the largest and the most diversified in modern humans. Our current study aims to investigate ethnic-specific BRCA variation in Asian population.
Methods We performed a comprehensive data mining to collect BRCA variation data in Indian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese populations derived from over 78 000 cancer and 40 000 non-cancer cases. We standardised all BRCA variation data following the international standard. We made a systematic comparison between the datasets including variant composition, variation spectrum, variant type, clinical class, founder mutation and high-frequent variants.
Results Our analysis showed that over half of the Asian BRCA variants were Asian-specific, and significant differences were present between the four Asia populations in each category analysed.
Conclusion Data from our study reveal that ethnic-specific BRCA variation is commonly present in Asia population as existing in non-Asian populations. Our study indicates that ethnicity should be an important factor to consider in prevention and treatment of BRCA mutation-related cancer in the Asia population. We recommend that the current BRCA variation databases should include ethnic variation information in order to function as true global BRCA references.
- DNA repair
- genetic heterogeneity
- genetic predisposition to disease
- genetics
- medical
- genetic variation
Data availability statement
All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.
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Data availability statement
All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.
Footnotes
Contributors Contributions SPB, HT, ZQ, BZ, JC, SL: data collection, annotation, analysis; BKR, JL, GM: statistics data analysis; SMW: design, data analysis and interpretation, manuscript writing.
Funding This study was funded by a Macau Science and Technology Development - Ministry of Science and Technology of People’s Republic of China fund (0077/2019/AMJ), a Macau Science and Technology Development Fund (085/2017/A2), grants from the University of Macau (SRG2017-00097-FHS, MYRG2019-00018-FHS), Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Macau (Startup fund, FHSIG/SW/0007/2020P) (SMW).
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Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.