RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Breast cancer (BC), is more prevalent in subjects who have had prolonged exposure to heterocyclic amines, aromatic amines and high levels of oestradiol. Cytochrome P450 1B1 (CYP1B1) and N-acetyltransferase2 (NAT2) have complementary role in metabolism of xenobiotics such as arylamines and heterocyclic amines, CYP1B1 also hyroxylates 17-beta oestradiol. CYP1B1*3 polymorphism and seven missense and four silent polymorphisms of NAT2 were investigated. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Sixty Turkish female BC patients and 103 healthy controls were phenotyped by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP). RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The distribution of NAT2 activity in the healthy control group was found to be correlated with that of healthy caucasians. Patients had slow acetylator phenotypes of NAT2, 1.8 times higher than controls but no statistical differences were found (p=0.07). In addition, the NAT2*5 alelle was more statistically correlated with breast cancer patients rather than the controls (p=0.02). Moreover, NAT2*5B was the most frequent haplotype of the NAT2*5 family (p=0.000). Breast cancer patients were detected to posses more CYP1B1*3 mutant alleles than the controls (p=0.043). The combined effect of CYP1B1*3 polymorphism and NAT2 slow acetylator genotype contributed to an increased risk for breast cancer in patients in this study (p=0.004).