Genetic predisposition and evolutionary traces of pediatric cancer risk: a prospective 5-year population-based genome sequencing study of children with CNS tumors.
Neuro Oncol
; 25(4): 761-773, 2023 04 06.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-35902210
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND:
The etiology of central nervous system (CNS) tumors in children is largely unknown and population-based studies of genetic predisposition are lacking.METHODS:
In this prospective, population-based study, we performed germline whole-genome sequencing in 128 children with CNS tumors, supplemented by a systematic pedigree analysis covering 3543 close relatives.RESULTS:
Thirteen children (10%) harbored pathogenic variants in known cancer genes. These children were more likely to have medulloblastoma (OR 5.9, CI 1.6-21.2) and develop metasynchronous CNS tumors (P = 0.01). Similar carrier frequencies were seen among children with low-grade glioma (12.8%) and high-grade tumors (12.2%). Next, considering the high mortality of childhood CNS tumors throughout most of human evolution, we explored known pediatric-onset cancer genes, showing that they are more evolutionarily constrained than genes associated with risk of adult-onset malignancies (P = 5e-4) and all other genes (P = 5e-17). Based on this observation, we expanded our analysis to 2986 genes exhibiting high evolutionary constraint in 141,456 humans. This analysis identified eight directly causative loss-of-functions variants, and showed a dose-response association between degree of constraint and likelihood of pathogenicity-raising the question of the role of other highly constrained gene alterations detected.CONCLUSIONS:
Approximately 10% of pediatric CNS tumors can be attributed to rare variants in known cancer genes. Genes associated with high risk of childhood cancer show evolutionary evidence of constraint.Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Cerebellar Neoplasms
/
Central Nervous System Neoplasms
/
Glioma
Type of study:
Etiology_studies
/
Risk_factors_studies
Limits:
Adult
/
Child
/
Humans
Language:
En
Journal:
Neuro Oncol
Journal subject:
NEOPLASIAS
/
NEUROLOGIA
Year:
2023
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Denmark