NHL Cytogenetic Epidemiology Study

Principal Investigator: Brian C. - H. Chiu, PhD

Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) comprises a heterogeneous group of malignancies that may vary in etiology. Unfortunately, most classification schemes (e.g., The Working Formulation) have grouped cases according to pathological or clinical characteristics, rather than characteristics that might be specifically related to etiology or useful for analytic epidemiological investigations. As an alternative, we propose to study risk factors for NHL according to rearrangements of the BCL2, BCL6, and C-MYC genes because cytogenetic studies have shown that recurring chromosomal abnormalities leading to the deregulation of these genes are important in the pathogenesis of certain NHL subtypes. The specific aims are to investigate whether the associations with cigarette smoking, farming and pesticide exposure, family history of hematopoietic cancer, and dietary intake of animal fat and meat differs for BCL2 rearrangement-positive NHL, BCL6 rearrangement-positive NHL, and C-MYC rearrangement-positive NHL. Approximately 540 tumor blocks will be retrieved from NHL cases in two existing population-based case-control studies, and there will be data on 1,967 controls for comparison. Chromosomal abnormalities will be determined by the fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) technique.