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Obesity and Cancer: 27-Hydroxycholesterol, the Missing Link - PubMed

  • ️Wed Jan 01 2020

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Obesity and Cancer: 27-Hydroxycholesterol, the Missing Link

Arvand Asghari et al. Int J Mol Sci. 2020.

Abstract

Obesity is currently affecting more than 40% of the Americans, and if it progresses with this rate, soon one out of two Americans will be obese. Obesity is an important risk factor for several disorders including cardiovascular disease, the first cause of death in the United States. Cancer follows as the second deadliest disease, and a link between obesity and cancer has been suggested. However, it is very hard to establish an exact connection between obesity and cancers due to the multifactorial nature of obesity. Hypercholesterolemia is a comorbidity of obesity and also linked to several cancers. Recently a cholesterol metabolite 27-hydroxycholesterol (27HC) was found to be an endogenous selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM), which opened new doors toward several interesting studies on the role of this molecule in biological disorders. It is speculated that 27HC might be the missing link in the obesity and cancer chain. Here, we explored the effects of 27-hydroxycholesterol on obesity and cancers with a focus on the SERM capacity of 27HC.

Keywords: 27-hydroxycholesterol; adipose; breast cancer; cancer; estrogen; estrogen receptor; obesity.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1

Expression Patterns of CYP27A1 and CYP7B1 in humans. (a) The gene expression of CYP27A1 and CYP7B1. The expression data were based on the RNA expression data obtained from more than 1000 individuals. The results were obtained from the GTEx Portal. (b) The expression of CYP27A1 and CYP7B1 proteins. The expression data of these enzyme protein levels were obtained from the work of Wang et al. which categorized the proteome data of 29 healthy human tissues [19]. The visualization of the results was done via Expression Atlas [20].

Figure 2
Figure 2

mRNA expression of CYP27A1 and CYP7B1 in different subtypes of breast cancer. (a) The expression level of CYP27A1 is significantly upregulated in TNBC compared to normal tissues (p-value < 10−6), while it is not different in ER-positive or HER2-positive group compared to the normal group (p-value > 0.5). (b) CYP7B1 mRNA expression is significantly lower in both luminal (p-value < 10−11) and HER2-positive (p-value < 10−5) tumor groups compared to normal breast tissues, while it is not different in TNBC compared to normal tissues (p-value > 0.5). The expression data are based on the TCGA data and visualized by the UALCAN portal [69].

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