Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Add topic to email alerts
Receive an email when new articles are posted on
Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on . “
data-action=”subscribe”>
Subscribe
We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com. Back to Healio Key takeaways: Researchers found the pesticide picloram may be linked to rising early-onset colorectal cancer incidence around the world. Diet and smoking also were associated with incidence. A global, commonly used pesticide could be associated with the rising incidence of early-onset colorectal cancer. A pair of analyses identified picloram, which the EPA described as \u201ca systemic herbicide used to control deeply rooted herbaceous weeds and woody plants in rights-of-way, forestry, rangelands, pastures and small grain crops,\u201d as a potential new risk factor for the disease.
Researchers identified the pesticide, picloram, as a potential new risk factor for colorectal cancer.\u00a0Image: Adobe Stock.
Jos\u00e9 A. Seoane \u201cWe didn\u2019t have any clue,\u201d Jos\u00e9 A. Seoane, PhD, head of the cancer computational biology group at Vall d\u2019Hebron Institute of Oncology in Spain, told Healio. Researchers found smoking, diet and educational attainment to be associated with early-onset colorectal cancer, as well. However, Seone emphasized the data could not determine causality. David J. Lee, MD, MPH, MMSc, a hematology\/oncology fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and colleagues published an accompanying perspective paper in Nature Medicine highlighting this and other questions. \u201cMany unknowns remain about whether and how picloram actually causes early-onset colorectal cancer,\u201d Lee said in a press release. \u201cWe are many steps removed from confirming that this is a risk factor for colorectal cancer, but I think what is novel and interesting is the approach the authors took to assess for various environmental exposures in patients with colorectal cancer.\u201d Healio spoke with Seoane about the data, future research and more. Healio: Why did you conduct this study? Seoane: The clinical collaborators of my institute were surprised about the amount of newly diagnosed early-onset colorectal cancer they were getting. Ten, 15 years ago, they had one patient from time to time. Now, they are diagnosing several every month. They are alarmed, and this is a general trend. It is not just here. They asked me, \u2018Are they different molecularly? Why is this happening?\u2019 Clinically, these tumors are more aggressive than the regular-onset ones. In my lab, we study genomics, proteomics and epigenomics of tumors. We started to check what are the characteristics of these early-onset tumors, and as other teams already did, they didn\u2019t find anything specific. We have tumors that are molecularly similar, but we have more tumors that were not there 20 years ago. If the tumors are the same, we thought that it must be something external. Healio: How did you proceed? Seoane: We came up with this idea of interrogating the methylation of the tumor. The first author, Silvana C.E. Maas, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at Vall d’Hebron, was studying how the epigenome changed by external factors, as smoking or alcohol consumption. We know many things that we do change our epigenetic landscape. If this is something that is outside, and we can read it within the tumor, then we can compare the exposure between early-onset and late-onset cancer and see if there is some external factor that is not the same between the two tumors. Healio: What did you find? Seoane: Signals of poor diet are more present in the early-onset tumors. We see the same with smoking, where we see that early-onset tumors have more smoking exposure. And then we have this pesticide, which was quite surprising for us because it was never mentioned anywhere that this pesticide could be associated with any type of tumor. Healio: What was your reaction to the pesticide finding? Seoane: We were super skeptical with this first result, and that\u2019s why we went to the population analysis. We got some data about colorectal cancer incidence from SEER, and we identified this other database that measures the use of pesticides per county in U.S. We used a model to find the overlap between the two databases. Then picloram shows up. In the first model we did, picloram was the third hit. One of the journal reviewers was very skeptical, and they said the pesticides are not used alone. Sometimes you use pesticides or a herbicide together with other ones. You should check. We adjusted the model for every other single pesticide. Then, picloram was the highest hit. The first hit in our first analysis was glyphosate. Then it came to the second position after the proper adjustment. Healio: Did it have any association with late-onset colorectal cancer? Seoane: We didn\u2019t check that specifically. We only analyzed the incidence of early-onset colorectal cancer. Healio: How concerning are these findings? Seoane: Keep in mind that this is an observational study. These are two observational studies that are leading us to the same risk factor. They are not causal. We cannot establish causality with the type of analysis we are doing. That is one of the main criticisms that we are seeing. This is the first limitation of the study. We can\u2019t say picloram causes early-onset colorectal cancer. We are doing two analyses that are totally different in terms of the data sources and the type of analysis, and we are seeing the same factor. This is concerning. This is a pesticide that is [commonly] used [in certain parts of the world]. We should push to do much more analyses, much better studies associated with this pesticide. Healio: What was your reaction to the diet, smoking and education data you found? Was that surprising? Expected? Seoane: Epidemiologists have been trying to identify factors that are associated with early-onset colorectal cancer, and smoking and diet have already been detected. Diabetes, too. We identified educational attainment as a proxy. People with poor educational attainment often have poor diet, too. All the signals<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2814,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"hemonc](\"https:\/\/www.healio.com\/~\/media\/h5\/feature\/news\/publogos\/hot.svg?la=en&h=24&w=141&hash=2F86D471C8514C0E334E329AA799E8B4\")
\n <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n