Abstract 3007: Psychosocial stressors and breast cancer gene expression in the Black Women's Health Study
Authors: Barnard Mollie E. , Wang Xutao , Petrick Jessica L. , Johnson W. Evan , Palmer Julie R. 
Published: April 2023

Introduction: Chronic sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activation following exposure to psychosocial stressors may influence cancer risk through dysregulation of immune function or adrenergic signaling pathways. Prior research out of the Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS) reported associations between psychosocial stressors and breast cancer risk. We hypothesized that women with greater exposure to psychosocial stressors before their breast cancer diagnosis have higher tumor gene expression of immune-related and adrenergic signaling pathways.

Methods: The BWHS is a large, prospective cohort study that has collected health and lifestyle information biennially since 1995. We included data from 417 BWHS breast cancer cases with RNA sequencing data and information on early-life trauma and neighborhood disadvantage. We used the R package DESeq2 to conduct age-adjusted differential gene expression analyses by levels of each stress exposure and described the top differentially expressed pathways using the Molecular Signature Database REACTOME subset of canonical pathways. Targeted analyses of immune-related pathways used CIBERSORT to quantify the proportions of infiltrating immune cells and the R package GSVA for single-sample gene set enrichment analysis (ssGSEA) of genes comprising a T cell exhaustion signature. We also used ssGSEA to evaluate a set of genes involved in adrenergic signaling. Given the variability in gene expression for ER+ versus ER- breast cancers, all analyses were run separately for ER+ (n=299) and ER- (n=118) tumors.

Results: Pathways related to nervous system development and the metabolism of RNA were differentially expressed by levels of stress exposures among ER+ and ER- cases, while pathways related to immune function and adrenergic signaling were differentially expressed only among ER- cases, and only when evaluating differential gene expression by levels of neighborhood disadvantage. Targeted analyses of tumor immune infiltration showed significantly higher B cell fractions among ER+ cases without exposure to early trauma compared to those with early trauma. The relative fractions of other immune cells did not differ by stress exposure for ER+ or ER- tumors. Findings from ssGSEA gene set analyses indicated similar expression of genes involved in T cell exhaustion and adrenergic signaling pathways by stress exposure levels for both ER+ and ER- breast cancers.

Conclusions: Our findings provide evidence of differential gene expression by levels of stress exposure; however, the differential expression may be driven by multiple pathways and not just the hypothesized immune-related and adrenergic signaling pathways. Additional studies are needed to describe mechanisms by which psychosocial stressors may influence breast cancer risk, both overall and by gene expression profile.

Citation Format: Mollie E. Barnard, Xutao Wang, Jessica L. Petrick, W. Evan Johnson, Julie R. Palmer. Psychosocial stressors and breast cancer gene expression in the Black Women's Health Study [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 3007.