Missing DNA may be reason young women get breast cancer

Groundbreaking research by a New Zealand Dr Logan Walker may hold the key to why women under 40 get breast cancer. Photo / File

A missing piece of DNA may hold the key to beating breast cancer at a young age.

The groundbreaking research is being lauded as a significant breakthrough in the fight against cancer, after a link was discovered between women under 40 with breast cancer and missing bits in their DNA.

New Zealand researcher Dr Logan Walker, who studied the DNA of hundreds of Australian women in their 20s and 30s with breast cancer, said the missing pieces could be the reason women with no inherited mutation inexplicably develop breast cancer at a young age.

"We think these pieces of DNA that are missing may have overlapped genes or involved genes that have contributed to the early onset of breast cancer," said Walker.

"If we can identify the genes that underlie risk, or the sorts of things that cause disease in these young women, then we can potentially identify those women before the disease has occurred, and if we can do that we can minimise the risk of or prevent the disease from occurring in the first place."

The next step was to confirm the findings by checking the DNA of tens of thousands of women from around the world.

Walker hoped the finding, published in the international journal Breast Cancer Research, would one day identify women at risk of developing cancer at a young age and improve treatment and survival rates.

He said about 170 Kiwi women under 40 develop cancer each year.

Of those, about 10 per cent of young female breast cancer sufferers had an inherited mutation. But for most there was no explanation, he said.