Epstein-Barr Virus and Breast Cancer

摘要

Studies on the association of EBV with Breast cancer have had notably inconsistent results. This is attributable partly to two persistent methodological problems: the technical challenges of localizing EBV to tumor cells, and the failure to address the epidemiological perspective, which could contribute to variability in EBV prevalence across studies. Toward this end, we have collected more breast cancer samples from China and India to investigate geographic differences. We also performed EBV analysis on microdissected tumor cells from PCR positive, EBER ISH positive and PCR positive, EBER negative samples. Our data showed there is no significant difference between conventional PCR and real-time PCR when targeting EBNA1 sequence on whole section samples. There is also no significant difference in the proportion of positive samples in different geographic regions. When amplifying DNA from microdissected tumor cells, the rate of detection of EBV was %lower than by whole section PCR alone, but much higher than by EBER ISH. The discrepancy between EBER ISH and PCR in microdissected tumor cells requires further investigation.