By: Dr. Gildardo Fco. Zafra de la Rosa.

It has been estimated that the DNA suffers more than 10,000 variations on a daily basis as a result of errors in the replication, errors in the repair or absence of the same. Fortunately, the cell has repair systems that are fixed to most mutations, even when they remain 10 to 56 substitutions to the year without functional changes important in the course of life. These mutations can occur in the germinal stage and therefore will be present in all cells of the human body, or may occur in the somatic tissue and its presence will be only on the specific cell line.

It has been shown that there are deleterious mutations from the embryonic life that are keeping for a lifetime, amplificándose and expressing many years later, are more frequent in the first few cell divisions, and diminish as embryonic development progresses. It has been recognized that mutations involved in squamous cell cancer of the lung and the adenocarcionoma ovarian generated in the early embryonic stage.

The tissues have different rates of mutation, which explains the differences in the frequency of different types of cancer, which is expressed preferentially in some organs, such as is observed in tissues such as cancer of the breast, lung, prostate, etc

In adult life, returns to increase the rate of mutations from 50 years of age generating neoplastic processes. It is considered that epigenetic factors play a relevant role to express the effect of these deleterious genes.