Ovarian surface epithelium: family history and early events in ovarian cancer
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BioMed Central
Open Access
Review
Ovarian surface epithelium: family history and early events in ovarian cancer Alice ST Wong*1 and Nelly Auersperg2 Address: 1Department of Zoology, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong and 2Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Email: Alice ST Wong* - [email protected]; Nelly Auersperg - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 07 October 2003 Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology 2003, 1:70
Received: 05 July 2003 Accepted: 07 October 2003
This article is available from: http://www.RBEj.com/content/1/1/70 © 2003 Wong and Auersperg; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original URL.
Abstract Ovarian cancer is the most common cause of death from gynecological cancers in the Western world. There are many genetic and environmental factors which can influence a woman's risk of getting ovarian cancer. A strong family history of breast or ovarian cancer is definitely one of the most important and best-defined epidemiological risk factors. This review evaluates current knowledge of hereditary ovarian cancer. Histologic, cytologic and molecular studies on the ovarian surface epithelium (OSE), which is the origin of ovarian epithelial carcinomas, from women with a strong family history for ovarian carcinomas or with a mutation in one of the two known cancer susceptibility genes – BRCA1 and BRCA2, provide a background to facilitate understanding of the early changes in ovarian carcinogenesis. This overview is followed by a discussion of recent hypotheses and research on two questions. First, is there a mutational hotspot of BRCA mutation for ovarian cancer? Second, why do mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2, which are ubiquitously expressed genes that participate in general cellular activities, lead preferentially to breast and ovarian cancer?
Introduction Ovarian surface epithelium (OSE)-derived ovarian carcinoma is the most lethal gynecological malignancy in North America. 5–10% of epithelial ovarian cancer involves strong family histories. Thus, the familial component is one of the most important and best-defined risk factors for ovarian cancer. A woman's lifetime risk for ovarian cancer is 1.4% but is estimated to be 15–60% for women with a strong family history and/or those who inherited a germline mutation in certain cancer susceptibility genes [1,2] (see below), suggesting that this increased risk has a genetic component. A strong family history refers to those having two or more first-degree relatives (parents, siblings and children) diagnosed with breast or ovarian cancer, and in some circumstances with
features of a type of bowel cancer (hereditary non-polyposis colon cancer, HNPCC, also called Lynch Syndrome II), at age 45 or younger. There are at least three types of family history of ovarian cancer indicative of a putative autosomal d
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