Infants with leukemia inherit susceptibility from parents, study indicates
Thursday, February 20, 2014 - 04:32
in Health & Medicine
Babies who develop leukemia during the first year of life appear to inherit an unfortunate combination of genetic variations that may make the infants highly susceptible to the disease, according to a new study. Doctors have long puzzled over why it is that babies just a few months old sometimes develop cancer. As infants, they have not lived long enough to accumulate a critical number of cancer-causing mutations. The babies appear to have inherited rare genetic variants from both parents that by themselves would not cause problems, but in combination put the infants at high risk of leukemia. These variants most often occurred in genes known to be linked to leukemia in children.