Arsenic as a Cause of Cancer

Abstract

Inorganic Arsenic (iAs) is a pervasive and ubiquitous environmental toxin that has created world-wide human health problems. Populations exposed to high concentrations of arsenic-contaminated drinking water suffer serious health consequences ranging from acute toxicities to development of malignancies, including alarming cancer incidence and death rates. Epidemiologic studies have shown a relationship between chronic arsenic exposure and disease of the skin, lung, urinary bladder, and conceivably liver, kidney, and prostate in people. Inorganic arsenic, a recorded human cancer-causing agent, is biotransformed through consecutive expansion of methyl gatherings, procured from S-adenosylmethionine (SAM). This is to imply that; arsenic is methylated in the body by substituting lessening of pentavalent arsenic to trivalent and expansion of a methyl bunch from SAM. The end metabolites are methylarsonic acid (MMA) and dimethylarsinic acid (DMA).  Absorbed arsenate (As^V) is decently quickly diminished in blood to As^III which infers expanded lethality. Digestion system of arsenic produces an assortment of genotoxic and cytotoxic species, harming DNA specifically and in a roundabout way, through the era of receptive oxidative species and enlistment of DNA adducts, strand breaks and cross connections, and hindrance of the DNA repair prepare itself. Since SAM is the methyl group donor utilized by DNA methyltransferases to keep up typical epigenetic designs in every single human cell, arsenic is additionally hypothesized to influence upkeep of ordinary DNA methylation designs, chromatin structure, and genomic stability. This review article is important in pinpointing the natural procedures fundamental the growth advancing components of arsenic digestion system, identified with DNA harm and repairs, in this way to make consciousness of it in the universal group.

Keywords: Inorganic arsenic, oxidative stress, carcinogenesis, cancer

Cite this Article

Gidey Gebremeskel, Haile Nega Mulata, Rezene Abraha Sibhat. Arsenic as a Cause of Cancer. Research & Reviews: Journal of Oncology and Hematology. 2016; 5(3): 8–21p.