Familial CLL | What Researchers Know

Transcript:

Jeff Folloder:  Dr. Wu, Ron wants you to know that his father-in-law and his wife have CLL, and now he’s been diagnosed. What do we know about familial CLL? And along the lines of what causes it, what about environmental exposures in CLL?

Dr. Catherine Wu:  Yeah. So, I do think that there have been some very, very interesting and well-done rigorous studies looking at familial CLL. And I think with more and more numbers of patients that have been profiled genomically, by now, from the work of our colleagues evaluating tens of thousands of patient CLLs, there begin to emerge some patterns, which is that there are areas of our genome that do provide some susceptibility to CLL.

All of them are what we call low effect sizes. So, any individual one of them probably doesn’t cause CLL, but an accumulation – it does set you on a path, and that there may be an accumulation of changes that happen that gets you to CLL. I think that that’s what we can say about the genetics. And I think there was just a study published this year that kind of was the accumulation of all the work that had been done in the 10, 15 years before. And really quite definitive. I think that environmental exposures is tougher to pinpoint. Bill, I don’t know if you had any comments there.

Dr. William Wierda:    No, I mean, we just know that the exposure to herbicides such as Agent Orange has been associated with the risk for developing CLL.

And that’s why the VA has made it a service-connected illness. So, there are associations, but just as you said, there hasn’t been as clear a delineation of exposure and developing the disease as there has been with, say, smoking and lung cancer or other such associations.