Parisa Zafari - Student Research Committee, Medical school, Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences, Kermanshah, Iran
Nasrin Iranshahi - Department of Immunology, Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences, Kermanshah, Iran
Kheirollah Yari - Zagros Bioidea Laboratory, Incubator Center of Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran

Introduction and aim: Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women. In Iran, breast cancer is one of the growing women’s health problems. Several environmental, genetic and epigenetics factors have been suggested to have a role in breast cancer development. Epigenetics alterations (especially methylation) are heritable changes in gene expression that occur without causing any change in DNA sequence. Association between epigenetics changes of many gene promoters with the risk of breast cancer has been investigated worldwide. This aberrant methylation may be occur in specific genes related to cell cycle, cell adhesion, apoptosis and DNA repairing mechanisms and results in silencing of these important genes. Methods: In this review study, we have gathered all the data until December 2015 about epigenetic modifications among Iranian population with breast cancer. We searched international web databases such as: PubMed, Scopus, and Persian web databases; IranMedex and Magiran to investigate the association of epigenetics change and incidence of breast cancer among Iranian population Results: Using methylation or epigenetics key words and Iran as affiliation, all the published data were 31. After arbitrary limitation in search keywords the result have been 20 articles. Analyses of founded data show that ER-α and E-Cadherin are most common studied genes in epigenetics modifications. Also, maximum studies were done in Tehran and Tabriz. Conclusion: Studies about this issue is very small in iran compare to other countries and with regard the importance of this mechanism in pathogenesis of many cancer, numerous studies need to be done

Epigenetics, Methylation, Breast cancer, Iran