Breast cancer survival and the expression of genes related to alcohol drinking

The authors of a paper published by PLOS One state that cumulative evidence supports a causal role of alcohol intake and breast cancer incidence.
In their study, the researchers explored the change on expression of genes involved in the biological pathways through which alcohol has been hypothesised to impact breast cancer risk, to shed new insights on possible mechanisms affecting the survival of breast cancer patients.
A differential expression analysis was performed at individual genes and gene set levels, respectively, across survival and breast cancer subtype data. Information about postdiagnosis breast cancer survival was obtained from 1977 Caucasian female participants in the Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium. Expression of 16 genes that have been linked in the literature to the hypothesised alcohol-breast cancer pathways, were examined.
The study found that the expression of 9 out of 16 genes under study were associated with cancer survival within the first 4 years of diagnosis. Results from gene set analysis confirmed a significant differential expression of these genes as a whole too. Although alcohol consumption was not analysed, nor was alcohol consumption data available for this dataset, the researchers believe that further study on these genes could provide important information for clinical recommendations about potential impact of alcohol drinking on breast cancer survival.
Source: Breast cancer survival and the expression of genes related to alcohol drinking Cheng HG, Gonzalez-Reymundez A, Li I, Pathak A, Pathak DR, de los Campos G, et al. PLoS ONE 15(2): e0228957.