Research article

Frequency of CHEK2*1100delC in New York breast cancer cases and controls

Kenneth Offit¹ , Heather Pierce¹ , Tomas Kirchhoff¹ , Prema Kolachana¹ , Beth Rapaport¹ , Peter Gregersen² , Steven Johnson³ , Orit Yossepowitch¹ , Helen Huang¹ , Jaya Satagopan¹ , Mark Robson¹ , Lauren Scheuer¹ , Khedoudja Nafa¹ and Nathan Ellis¹

¹Departments of Medicine and Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, N.Y, USA

²Center for Genomics and Human Genetics, North Shore Long Island Jewish Research Institute, Manhasset, N.Y, USA

³Department of Bioinformatics, Columbia University, New York, N.Y, USA

author email corresponding author email

BMC Medical Genetics 2003, 4:1doi:10.1186/1471-2350-4-1

Published:	15 January 2003

Abstract

Background

The 1100delC CHEK2 allele has been associated with a 1.4–4.7 fold increased risk for breast cancer in women carrying this mutation. While the frequency of 1100delC was 1.1–1.4% in healthy Finnish controls, the frequency of this allele in a North American control population and in North American breast cancer kindreds remains unclear.

Methods

We genotyped 1665 healthy New York volunteers and 300 cases of breast cancer for the CHEK2*1100delC.

Results

The overall frequency of the 1100delC was 3/300 (1.0%) among all cases with either a family history of breast cancer (n = 192) or a personal history of breast cancer (n = 108, of which 46 were bilateral, 46 unilateral, and 16 were male breast cancer cases), compared to a frequency of 5/1665 (0.3%) in healthy controls (p = 0.1). There was no difference in allele frequency among Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi controls.

Conclusion

The relatively low breast cancer penetrance of this allele, along with the low population frequency, will limit the clinical applicability of germline testing for CHEK2*1100delC in North American kindreds.