In a new study from the U.S. National Cancer Institute, researchers found that cancer-free people older than 60 have at least 100 billion cells with at least one cancer-associated mutation.
But the vast majority of these mutations won’t do anything and most people (60%) will go their entire lives without a cancer diagnosis.
In the study, the team conducted a meta-analysis of previously published studies on normal tissues, to categorize mutations that occur after egg fertilization.
Researchers know that a lot of the mutations in people would be oncogenic, or associated with cancer, but they just didn’t know how many.
The team found that the vast majority of mutations don’t do anything, they don’t cause any problems, and many aren’t even in coding sequences.
They say that to understand the genesis of cancer, researchers need to look at normal tissue.
By the time it’s developed into cancer, all the mutations are there and doctors don’t always know which ones are contributing to the actual genesis of cancer.
The team says every cell in our bodies has dozens and dozens of mutations, if not hundreds or thousands, so future work needs to see whether these patterns of mutations that we see can dictate whether someone is at high risk of cancer.
Another possible avenue for research will be studying why some tissues have such a high rate of oncogenic mutations but a comparatively low occurrence of cancer, while other types of tissue have a relatively low level of oncogenic mutations.
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The study is published in the journal Aging and Cancer. One author of the study is James DeGregori.
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