Mant Christine, Hodgson Shirley, Hobday Richard, D'Arrigo Corrado, Cason John
Infection and Immunity Laboratory, Guy's College and St Thomas' School of Medicine, King's College London, London, UK.
Intervirology. 2004;47(1):2-13. doi: 10.1159/000076636.
Despite decades of research, no aetiologic factor(s) for human breast cancer has been identified and the search for a causal agent has all but been abandoned during the past thirty years. Over 60 years ago, it was demonstrated that breast tumours in mice are caused by an oncornavirus, murine mammary tumour virus (MMTV). Whilst many at that time postulated a similar virus might be the causative agent of human breast cancer, genetic evidence was difficult to obtain primarily because of the occurrence of endogenous human retrovirus (HER) sequences within the human genome that share extensive regions of nucleotide homology with MMTV. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in the possibility that a significant proportion of human breast cancers may be caused by viral infections. Two candidate viruses have been proposed, a human retroviral analogue of MMTV (which differs significantly in sequence and characteristics from HERs) and, the Epstein-Barr virus (gamma-herpes virus). These two viruses have been reported to occur in up to 37 and 50% of breast cancer cases, respectively. Here we present the background to the infectious hypothesis for the aetiology of breast cancer and review recent findings.
尽管经过了数十年的研究，但尚未确定人类乳腺癌的病因，在过去三十年里，寻找致病因子的工作几乎已被放弃。六十多年前，人们证实小鼠的乳腺肿瘤是由一种致癌病毒——鼠乳腺肿瘤病毒（MMTV）引起的。虽然当时许多人推测类似的病毒可能是人类乳腺癌的致病因子，但主要由于人类基因组中存在与MMTV具有广泛核苷酸同源区域的内源性人类逆转录病毒（HER）序列，很难获得基因证据。最近，人们重新燃起了对相当一部分人类乳腺癌可能由病毒感染引起这一可能性的兴趣。已提出两种候选病毒，一种是MMTV的人类逆转录病毒类似物（其序列和特征与HERs有显著差异），另一种是爱泼斯坦-巴尔病毒（γ-疱疹病毒）。据报道，这两种病毒分别在高达37%和50%的乳腺癌病例中出现。在此，我们介绍乳腺癌病因的感染假说背景，并综述近期研究结果。
