Back toColorectal cancer ncidencia among young adults has multiplied during the last twenty years without knowing why, but an International team of researchers has now discovered that That increase could be due to a bacterial infection during childhood.
Fruit of a International Projectl in which the University of California In San Diego, the Wellcome Sanger Institute (United Kingdom) and the International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC) of the world Health Organization, researchers have been able to reveal that The exhibition during childhood to a bacterial toxin could be triggering that epidemic of colorectal cancer among young people. This Wednesday they publish the results of their work in the magazine Nature.
The work was led by the University of California and the first signer of the same is the Spanish researcher Marcos Díaz Gay, who completed in that academic institution his doctoral studies and currently directs the digital genomics group of the National Oncological Research Center (CNIO).
Colorectal cancer is considered a disease associated with aging, but Its incidence in adults under 50 years of age has doubled each decade in the last 20 years In various countries around the world, and researchers have now pointed out Colibactin bacterial toxin as possible guilty of this increase.
A toxin produced by Escherichia coli
Colibactin is a toxin produced by some strains of’escheichia coli, one of the multiple bacteria that populate the colon and the rectum, and has the ability to alter the DNA of the cells, the CNIO has detailed, and has specified that the finding reveals that LTo exposure to that toxin in early childhood prints a different genetic firm in the DNA of colon cells.
The result is based on a computational analysis of genetic mutations, and is the first that demonstrates a substantial increase in mutations related to that toxin in cases of colorectal cancer in children under 50, but poses questions that researchers still cannot answer, including how the infection of colibactin producing bacteria occurs and how to avoid or combat it ..
Research published today has also revealed that there are certain ‘Mutational signatures’ especially frequent in colorectal cancers from some countries, in particular Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Russia y Thailandwhich suggests that Local environmental exposure can also contribute to cancer, although it is still unknown to what factors.
Therefore, the Spanish researcher has pointed out that It is possible that the causes vary from one country to another, which would open the door to specific prevention strategies for each region.
The main cause of death among young adults in 2030
The results of this research have revealed that the harmful effects of that toxin begin soon, since the mutations associated with it arise at an early stage of tumor development, which coincides with previous studies that show that Such mutations occur in the first 10 years of life.
Researchers have pointed out that Sand someone acquires one of these driving mutations at 10 yearsthe development of colorectal cancer could advance decades, and a person I could suffer from 40 years instead of 60.
The implications of this work are very relevant, scientists have highlighted, because if the current trend is maintained, Colorectal cancer could be the main cause of cancer death in young adults in 2030.
Until now the cause of this increase was unknown, since young people with colorectal cancer do not usually have a family history and have few known risk factors, such as obesity or hypertension, which has made possible reindeting possible causes between possible environmental carcinogens or microbial infections.
In fact, the researchers did not focus on the beginning on the colorectal cancer of early appearance, but were aimed at examining world patterns of such cancer to understand why some countries have much higher rates than others.
But as they deepened the data, the researchers verified that One of the most striking findings was the frequency with which mutations related to that bacterial toxin appeared in cases of early appearanceand thus arrived at the conclusions published today by the magazine Nature.
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