The association between high N-RAS levels and the most aggressive among breast cancer subtypes, the triple-negative phenotype, for which targeted approaches are still lacking, underlines the need to further investigate the RAS family.
There was no support for an association between rare HRAS1 alleles and the risk of early-onset breast cancer, despite 80% power to detect effects of the magnitude of those associations (1.7-fold) previously suggested.
We analyzed 66 independent cases from sib pairs affected with breast cancer that had previously been collected during an investigation of pathogenetic-allele-sharing at the HRAS1 mini-satellite locus.
There may be more common mutations in other genes (such as ATM, HRAS1) that confer a moderate risk of breast cancer, and may account for 5 to 15 per cent of cases.