People who blush when drinking alcohol are more likely to develop stomach cancer!

Recently, a study published in Science Advances showed that people who blush when drinking have a greater risk of stomach cancer caused by drinking.

The researchers sequenced the genomes of 531 patients (319 Asians and 212 non-Asians) with gastric cancer.

The study found that a subtype of gastric cancer has a distinct alcohol-related mutational signature and strong Asian specificity, which is almost entirely attributed to drinking, smoking, and Asian-specific ALDH2 allele defects.

Among this group of patients, 70% carry the ALDH2 gene mutation, more than 90% are Asians, and the average alcohol consumption of this group of patients is not high.

This means that patients with ALDH2 gene mutations have a significantly increased risk of gastric cancer even if they only drink small amounts of alcohol.

Specifically, approximately one fifth of diffuse-type gastric cancers can be attributed to alcohol intake and either ALDH2 allele mutation or deletion or CDH1 variants.

As we all know, ALDH2 is one of the most important enzymes in the body's alcohol metabolism. People who carry the ALDH2 gene break down ethanol about 13 times faster than other people.

People with loss-of-function mutations in the aldehyde dehydrogenase gene ALDH2 metabolize acetaldehyde more slowly, their faces turn red when they drink, and they have poor alcohol tolerance.

Nearly 40% of the Chinese population has ALDH2 gene mutations. If the ALDH2 gene is mutated or missing, the activity of the corresponding protease will be greatly reduced, causing acetaldehyde to accumulate in the body for a long time and unable to be metabolized, which in turn causes capillary dilation, skin flushing and inflammation, which is the so-called "face flushing after drinking".

Source: Suzuki A, Katoh H, Komura D, et al. Defined lifestyle and germline factors predispose Asian populations to gastric cancer. Sci Adv. 2020;6(19):eaav9778. Published 2020 May 6. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aav9778.

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