Manifestations of nasopharyngeal carcinoma affected by genetics

Li Gang has been worried about one thing recently because his uncle has nasopharyngeal cancer, but this is not the point. The important thing is that his grandfather also died of nasopharyngeal cancer a few years ago. He still remembers that when he went to the hospital to visit his grandfather, his grandfather became blind due to the worsening of nasopharyngeal cancer, had difficulty eating, and struggled in bed because of pain. Later, he finally passed away due to the pain. This left a deep shadow on his childhood.

And now his uncle has also been diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer, which has forced him to start worrying about whether nasopharyngeal cancer is hereditary and whether he will eventually get the disease.

In fact, Li Gang's concern is not unreasonable, because the occurrence of nasopharyngeal cancer is indeed affected by genetic factors, as shown below:

1. Family clustering phenomenon: Many nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients have a family history of cancer, and nasopharyngeal carcinoma has a vertical and horizontal familial tendency.

2. Racial susceptibility: Nasopharyngeal carcinoma is mainly seen in the Asian race and rarely in the Caucasian race. The descendants of ethnic groups with a high incidence rate still have a high incidence rate after migrating to other places.

3. Regional concentration: Nasopharyngeal carcinoma mainly occurs in five southern provinces of my country, namely Guangdong, Guangxi, Hunan, Fujian and Jiangxi, and ranks first among local head and neck malignant tumors.

4. Susceptibility genes: In recent years, molecular genetic studies have found that the main chromosomal changes in NPC tumor cells are chromosomes 1, 3, 11, 12 and 17. The discovery of multiple chromosomal heterozygous loss regions in NPC tumor cells may indicate the occurrence of NPC, and there are multiple tumor suppressor gene mutations during the development process.