Heritability And Genetic Correlations For Hormone-Sensitive Cancers In The UK Biobank: A Molecular Evidence of Shared Aetiology
Abstract Hormone-related cancers, including cancers of the breast, prostate, ovaries, uterine, and thyroid, globally contribute to the majority of cancer incidence. We hypothesize that hormone-sensitive cancers share common genetic risk factors that have rarely been investigated by previous genomic studies of site-specific cancers. To test this hypothesis, we analysed five hormone-sensitive cancers in the UK Biobank as a single disease. We observed that a significant proportion of variance in disease liability was explained by the genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), i.e., SNP-based heritability on the liability scale was estimated as 10.06% (SE 0.70%) for the disease. Moreover, we found 55 genome-wide significant SNPs for the disease, using a genome-wide association study. Our finding suggests that heritable genetic factors may be a key driver in the mechanism of carcinogenesis shared by hormone-sensitive cancers.