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Normal is not always normal. New study reveals that large groups of cells in healthy tissue carry mutations, including those related to cancer.
About 7% of healthy people had mutated cell fragments in at least one of the 29 tissues examined, including kidneys, muscles and liver, researchers said on June 7th. Science. Most of the mutations found in the 488 people in the study are harmless, but some have been associated with various cancers.
Keren Yizhak of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and colleagues found that about 40% of the tissues had at least one large patch of mutated cells and about 5% of the samples studied had at least five mutant patches.
The researchers found that cutaneous, oesophageal and pulmonary tissues contained more of these mutant plaques than other tissues. These three types of tissue are exposed to more ultraviolet rays, pollution, smoke or other environmental factors that may cause mutations than internal organs, which are not directly exposed to these external factors. In people of European descent, sun-exposed skin has accumulated more mutations than covered skin. African Americans have not experienced the same increase in skin-exposed skin mutations.
Age also affected the number of mutations, with mutations occurring more often after the age of 45 in tissues that divide to form new cells. The researchers found that tissues that did not actively develop did not tend to develop age-related mutations.
It is not yet possible to say how much a tissue is about to become cancerous, but this study is a first step to answer this question, wrote Cristian Tomasetti, researcher in oncology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Science.
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