Interlinkage among DNA methylation, obesity and colorectal cancer

Many kinds of epigenetic methods like DNA methylation affect the weight and cause obesity, which is a high risk factor of colorectal cancer. To find the association between obesity and CRC and DNA methylation we studied CRC patients and obese, concentrating on genome-wide DNA methylation changes. Consequences exhibited unequal distributions of overlapping distinct methylated regions like hyper methylated CpG islands that can be responsible for epigenetic instability causing cancer to start in obese patients. In addition, functional investigation proposes that DNA methylation alterations of extracellular components like o-glycan processing and intracellular components play a role for activation of cancer causing genes like KRAS and SCL2A1 and repression of tumor suppressors like ARHGEF4, EPHB2 and SOCS3 causing an increase in ability of oncogenes to cause cancer. Our study suggests that how in obesity DNA methylation occurs and takes part in development of colorectal cancer, giving direct evidence of relationship between CRC and obesity. It also shows using DNA methylation as diagnostic marker and early risk evaluation to detect patients with high risk for CRC.