A multi-stage genome-wide association study of bladder cancer identifies multiple susceptibility loci.

We conducted a multi-stage, genome-wide association study of bladder cancer with a primary scan of 591,637 SNPs in 3,532 affected individuals (cases) and 5,120 controls of European descent from five studies followed by a replication strategy, which included 8,382 cases and 48,275 controls from 16 studies. In a combined analysis, we identified three new regions associated with bladder cancer on chromosomes 22q13.1, 19q12 and 2q37.1: rs1014971, (P = 8 × 10⁻¹²) maps to a non-genic region of chromosome 22q13.1, rs8102137 (P = 2 × 10⁻¹¹) on 19q12 maps to CCNE1 and rs11892031 (P = 1 × 10⁻⁷) maps to the UGT1A cluster on 2q37.1. We confirmed four previously identified genome-wide associations on chromosomes 3q28, 4p16.3, 8q24.21 and 8q24.3, validated previous candidate associations for the GSTM1 deletion (P = 4 × 10⁻¹¹) and a tag SNP for NAT2 acetylation status (P = 4 × 10⁻¹¹), and found interactions with smoking in both regions. Our findings on common variants associated with bladder cancer risk should provide new insights into the mechanisms of carcinogenesis

Heat pulse propagation studies around magnetic islands induced by the Dynamic Ergodic Divertor in TEXTOR

Since the efficiency of the tearing mode suppression by heating depends on the electron heat diffusivity it is important to know if the electron heat transport coefficients inside the island are reduced compared with the ambient plasma. With that aim, modulated ECRH has been employed for heat pulse propagation studies in and around magnetic islands at the TEXTOR tokamak. The combination of its special hardware tools of the Dynamic Ergodic Divertor to generate tearing modes, the ECRH system for producing heat pulses and the electron cyclotron emission imaging (ECE-Imaging) diagnostic for its analysis offered a direct view of the perturbed two-dimensional heat flow in around the magnetic island. Inside m/n = 2/1 and m/n = 3/1 islands with a flattened temperature profile, the electron heat transport is shown to be strongly reduced with respect to the surrounding plasma. Inside the islands a heat pulse diffusion coefficients chi(e) similar to 0.4 m(2) s(-1) was derived, while outside the island it is an order of magnitude larger chi(e) > 3 m(2) s(-1). In contrast, power balance calculations of strongly heated islands show that the electron transport is similar to the surrounding plasma. These results suggest that the heat transport inside a magnetic island is also governed by a critical gradient-like behaviour, similar to the bulk plasma.X1121sciescopu