According to a new study led by researchers from University of California, San Francisco, one in five Latina women with indigenous American ancestors carry a variant that lowers their risk of breast cancer.

The study, titled "Genome-wide association study of breast cancer in Latinas identifies novel protective variants on 6q25," was released Monday in Nature Communications. According to a UCSF article, the study found that the variant is "a difference in just one of the three billion 'letters' in the human genome known as a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) ..."

"The effect is quite significant," Dr. Elad Ziv, professor of medicine and senior author of the study, explained. "If you have one copy of this variant, which is the case for approximately 20 percent of U.S. Latinas, you are about 40 percent less likely to have breast cancer. If you have two copies, which occurs in approximately 1 percent of the U.S. Latina population, the reduction in risk is on the order of 80 percent."

According to a 2007-2009 study by the National Cancer Institute cited by Fox News Latino, Latinas were found to have less than a 10 percent risk of acquiring breast cancer during their lives, compared to 13 percent for white women and 11 percent for black women.

"The findings from this study are interesting and anchor the idea that both genetic and environmental/diet/lifestyle factors are likely to influence breast cancer risk across cultures and ancestral backgrounds," Dr. Jeffrey N. Weitzel, director of California's City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, told FNL. "Further, they start to illuminate some of the observations about differences between Hispanic and non-Hispanic white women."

The principal investigator of the UCSF study, Dr. Laura Fejerman, assistant professor of medicine and a member of UCSF's Institute of Human Genetics, is Latina.

"This work was done as a collaboration of multiple investigators, many of us originally from Latin America," she said in the UCSF article. "As a Latina myself, I am gratified that there are representatives of that population directly involved in research that concerns them."

The variant is possibly more common in more indigenous areas.

"My expectation would be that if you go to a highly indigenous region in Latin America, the frequency of the variant would be between 15 and 20 percent," Dr. Fejerman explained to The New York Times. "But in places with very low indigenous concentration -- places with high European ancestry -- you might not even see it."

Jacky Loube, American Breast Cancer Foundation CEO, insisted to FNL that Latinas, which represent the highest number of mammograms and ultrasounds, still get regular screenings.

"I'm confident that this finding is going to hold, that most women who have this genetic variant are at lower risk of breast cancer, but keep in mind that some women with this variant still get breast cancer," Dr. Otis W. Brawley, chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, told The New York Times. "It might be because they have this variant and something else that cancels it out."

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Follow Scharon Harding on Twitter: @ScharHar.

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