Cancer drugs shown to cause mutations in mice offspring

[arauca]

(Medical Xpress) -- For many years, most of the studies done to see what effects cancer treatment has on the offspring of survivors, has involved radiation. This is because radiation is known to cause mutations in cells. Not so well studied have been the generational effects of chemicals used to treat cancer. Now, research by Colin Glen and Yuri Dubrova at the University of Leicester in the UK, shows that male rats given chemotherapy drugs sire pups that have twice as many mutations in a part of their DNA as do their fathers. They have published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-cancer-drugs-shown-mutations-mice.html

 

[Hercules Rockefeller]

That’s really interesting stuff, but I bet many people will make way too much of it. From the link:

The authors suggest their findings should not be cause for alarm however, as most cancer patients are too old to conceive children, or become sterile as a result of treatment, leaving children who receive treatment as the one group at possible risk. But they say, their results need to be taken in proper context. The mice used in the study only live for a couple of years, thus they reproduce much sooner after receiving the chemicals than children would as they take much longer to reach child bearing age. To find out if a time lag might allow for repair of the damaged genes before reproducing, more research will need to be done with animals that live much longer.

Also, I noticed that they tested two alkylating agents (cyclophosphamide and procarbazine) and one cytotoxic antibody (mitomycin C). There are at least half a dozen other classes of chemotherapy drugs with different modes of action that may not have the same genotoxic effect.