Review on the role of EBV in breast cancer induction

Increasing rate of different cancers all over the world in spite of decreasing most known cancer inducing factors indicates that very important neglected factors are acting as etiologic cause of cancer. Many scientists and pathologists from the past century have been proposed an etiologic role of microbes in cancer induction and an infectious entity for tumors. The aim of this review was to research on the role of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in the breast cancer. Methods: All of the review, systematic review and other original studies of Pubmed, Cochrane library andinternet based related records in the time course of 2004-2014 years were collected and studied in this research.Findings: EBV is one of the common viral infections of humans with more than 95% of population affliction which have been proposed as a probable cause of breast cancer. Important studies have been done on the elucidation of relationships of EBV proteins (including EBNA-1, LMP-1, and EBER) and viral sequences in breast cancer cells.in laboratory studies transfection of p31 fragment of EBV DNA has immortalized epithelial cells including mammary epithelial cells.The etiologic role of virus was strongly discussed in induction of subtypes of Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas (especially Burkitt’s lymphoma), HIV/AIDS lymphomas, nasopharyngeal carcinoma and gastric carcinoma, primary invasive breast cancer (PIBC). Discussion and Conclusion: Although in many of the studies the etiologic relation have not been confirmed definitly, but presenceof viral gene sequence in tumor cells and poor prognosis of patients carrying viral gene or proteins in the serum have proposed a strong role for EBV as inducing breast cancer in addition of other genetic and environmental factors. Some intrinsic characteristics of EBV such as immunodeficiency induction in patients, similar to other microbes are among pivotal factors of cancer induction processes.

Keywords:

Breast cancer , EBV , etiology