Random DNA mutations cause cancer - Italian-led team in U.S.

(ANSA) - Rome, March 24 - An Italian-led Johns Hopkins University team in the USA has found that there is a third cause of cancer besides heredity and environment: random mutations due to errors in DNA replication. The study, based on data from 32 forms of cancer in 69 countries and published in the journal Science, was led by Cristian Tomasetti, who has been in the US for 15 years. The group is the same one that in 2015 established for the first time the role of chance in the appearance of tumours, but those initial results were charged with being incomplete (data on breast and prostate cancer were lacking, for instance).
    "Now e have included these data and we have based our analysis on data from 69 countries, which make up the majority of the world population," Tomasetti told ANSA.
    "The results we obtained are essentially the same," he said, and "they continue to suggest that there is an important correlation between the number of stem-cell divisions in an organ and the risk of cancer".
    "What the new data represent, Tomasetti argues, is "a paradigm change", in the sense that hitherto it was thought that environmental and hereditary factors caused cancer, plus 60% of unknown causes.
    "Now we can say that random mutations are an important part of that 60%," Tomasetti said.