Two babies in Japan may have developed Long cancer after inhaling cancer cells at birth from their mothers, according to a new case report.
About 1 in every 1,000 babies is born to mothers who have cancer, but only one in every 500,000 of these newborns develops cancer from their mother. Although these cases are extremely rare, researchers knew that the transmission could take place if cancer cells ended up in the mother’s blood in the placenta.
Now researchers in Japan have identified a previously unknown mode of transmission: two babies born to mothers with cervical cancer may have developed lung cancer after the “aspiration” of tumor cells that were in the amniotic fluid, secretions or blood from the cervix, the authors write in a case study published on January 7 in The New England Journal of Medicine.
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The cases involve a 23-month-old boy who went to a local hospital in Japan with a cough that did not subside for two weeks, and a six-year-old boy who went to the hospital with chest pain. . Both boys were diagnosed with lung cancer.
The mother of the 23-month-old boy was diagnosed with cervical cancer three months after the boy was born, but probably had a tumor during his birth. The son and mother were treated with chemotherapy, various medications and surgeries to remove cancerous tissue; and while the child’s cancer disappeared, the mother progressed and five months later led to her death.
The mother of the six-year-old boy had a known cervical tumor during her pregnancy, but according to the report, it is stable and was not treated at the time. After delivery, a biopsy revealed that she had cervical cancer; she died two years after the operation to remove the tumor. The boy underwent chemotherapy among other treatments and his left lung was removed; he was followed for 15 months after the operation and according to the report remained without cancer.
To understand the link between the tumors in the mothers and their children, the researchers compared tumor tissues and normal tissues of the two young patients and their mothers, specifically looking for mutations in 114 cancer-related genes. They found that the boys ‘lung tumors had many genetic similarities with the mothers’ cervical tumors.
The boys’ tumors both did not have the Y chromosome – one of the two sex chrosomes passed down from father to son – meaning that the tumor was probably inherited from the mothers. They also discovered that the tumors have similar properties to the tumors that occur in each of the boys’ mothers, such as mutations that occur in cells called somatic cells and that are not usually transmitted to children. The lung tumors also contain small genetic mutations similar to those in the mother that were not found in the other tissues of the child. Both boys’ tumors also have DNA from the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is thought to cause most cases of cervical cancer.
The “detailed genomic examination and comparison of the mother and child cancer cells provides unequivocal evidence” that the two tumors are from the same clone, or group of identical cells, said Sir Mel Greaves, founder of the Center for Evolution and Cancer at The Institute of Cancer Research in London, which was not part of the study. “The story is very believable.”
Because these patients developed tumors specifically in the lungs and not across the body, as is common in most other documented cases of spread of mother-to-child cancer, the infants probably had their tumors from their mothers during their birth. ‘inspired’, the authors write.
It’s ‘fairly likely but not provable’ that this is what happened, Greaves said in an email to WordsSideKick. Although extremely rare, these cases suggest that it is possible to transmit cancer to babies during birth, which is why the authors recommend C-sections for mothers with cervical cancer.
“This is a very interesting report,” says Dr. Theodore Laetsch, a pediatric oncologist and director of the Very Rare Malignant Tumors Program at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, who was also not involved in the study. It is “clear from the genetic data that cancer of both babies came to their mothers as a result of cancer.”
But “I still think it is possible that the cancer crossed the placenta as described in other patients and that the cancer cells only grew in the lungs for other reasons,” Laetsch wrote in an email to Live Science.
Originally published on Live Science.