Ovarian cancer: BRCA2 mutation associated with improved survival
Having mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes lead to a higher risk of breast and ovarian cancers in women, but the mutations don’t affect health outcomes in exactly the same way.
A team led by researchers from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston reported Tuesday that having a mutated BRCA2 gene was associated with improved survival and chemotherapy response among a group of women with ovarian cancer.
In fact, women with BRCA2 mutations had better survival after treatment than women without mutations on either gene, the group wrote in a study published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
The same was not true of women in the study with BRCA1 mutations, the team found.
Da Yang and colleagues investigated genetic and clinical data on 316 women with ovarian cancer released in 2009 and 2010 by the Cancer Genome Atlas Project, an effort coordinated by the National Institutes of Health that compiles cancer genomes -- the genetic patterns associated with various cancer types -- and makes them available to researchers.
In this study, the 29 women who had BRCA2 mutations were more sensitive to chemotherapy than the other women in the study. Sixty-one percent of the women with BRCA2 mutations survived five years, versus only 25% of the women without BRCA mutations. Forty-four percent of the BRCA2 group survived for three years without progression of their disease, versus 16% of women without the mutations.
Learning more about how BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations affect the body could help scientists treat ovarian cancer more effectively, wrote Drs. Victor R. Grann and Ramon E. Parsons, both of the Columbia University Medical Center, in an accompanying editorial.
“The discrepancy between response and survival among BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers should encourage attention to the differences in treatment between the 2 groups, particularly among women with ovarian cancer,” they wrote. “Further refinement in the understanding of the differences in the DNA repair deficits due to BRCA1 vs BRCA2 mutations could lead to therapy that is better targeted.”
