Lymphoma-Associated Biomarkers Are Increased in Current Smokers in Twin Pairs Discordant for Smoking

Jun Wang; David V Conti; Marta Epeldegui; Miina Ollikainen; Rachel F Tyndale; Amie Eunah Hwang; Larry Magpantay; Thomas McCulloch Mack; Otoniel Martinez-Maza; Jaakko Kaprio; Wendy Cozen

doi:10.3390/cancers13215395

Lymphoma-Associated Biomarkers Are Increased in Current Smokers in Twin Pairs Discordant for Smoking

Cancers (Basel). 2021 Oct 27;13(21):5395. doi: 10.3390/cancers13215395.

Authors

Jun Wang¹, David V Conti^{1

2}, Marta Epeldegui³, Miina Ollikainen⁴, Rachel F Tyndale⁵, Amie Eunah Hwang¹, Larry Magpantay³, Thomas McCulloch Mack^{1

6}, Otoniel Martinez-Maza^{3

7

8}, Jaakko Kaprio^{4

9}, Wendy Cozen^{10

11

12}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
² Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
³ Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, AIDS Institute, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
⁴ Department of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, 00014 Helsinki, Finland.
⁵ Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Departments of Pharmacology & Toxicology, and Psychiatry, University of Toronto, and Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute, Toronto, ON M5S 1A8, Canada.
⁶ Department of Pathology, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
⁷ Department of Epidemiology, Fielding School of Public Health, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
⁸ Microbiology and Immunology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
⁹ Institute for Molecular Medicine, University of Helsinki, 00014 Helsinki, Finland.
¹⁰ Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology-Oncology, School of Medicine, University of California Irvine, Orange, CA 92868, USA.
¹¹ Department of Pathology, School of Medicine, University of California Irvine, Orange, CA 92868, USA.
¹² Department of Epidemiology, School of Population Health, Susan and Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.

Abstract

Smoking is associated with a moderate increased risk of Hodgkin and follicular lymphoma. To understand why, we examined lymphoma-related biomarker levels among 134 smoking and non-smoking twins (67 pairs) ascertained from the Finnish Twin Cohort. Previously collected frozen serum samples were tested for cotinine to validate self-reported smoking history. In total, 27 immune biomarkers were assayed using the Luminex Multiplex platform (R & D Systems). Current and non-current smokers were defined by a serum cotinine concentration of >3.08 ng/mL and ≤3.08 ng/mL, respectively. Associations between biomarkers and smoking were assessed using linear mixed models to estimate beta coefficients and standard errors, adjusting for age, sex and twin pair as a random effect. There were 55 never smokers, 43 current smokers and 36 former smokers. CCL17/TARC, sgp130, haptoglobin, B-cell activating factor (BAFF) and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP1) were significantly (p < 0.05) associated with current smoking and correlated with increasing cotinine concentrations (P_trend < 0.05). The strongest association was observed for CCL17/TARC (P_trend = 0.0001). Immune biomarker levels were similar in former and never smokers. Current smoking is associated with increased levels of lymphoma-associated biomarkers, suggesting a possible mechanism for the link between smoking and risk of these two B-cell lymphomas.

Keywords: BAFF; Hodgkin lymphoma; MCP1; TARC/CCL17; biomarkers; chemokines; cytokines; follicular lymphoma; smoking; spg130; twins.

Abstract

Grants and funding