Carcinogenesis

Abstract

Cancer ranks as the toxic effect of most concern to the public. Because of this, considerable effort and financial resources are spent annually to identify potential human carcinogens. The purpose of this chapter is to supply basic information pertaining to carcinogenesis in rodents which is essential for understanding and interpreting the results of chronic rodent carcinogenicity studies. This chapter is divided into six sections. Section 2 provides an overview of mechanisms hypothesized to be involved in chemical carcinogenesis. Section 3 presents data on spontaneous carcinogenesis in several strains of mice and rats commonly used in chronic bioassays. Information pertaining to the design of the chronic rodent carcinogenicity study and the susceptibility of various rodent organs/tissues to chemically induced carcinogenesis can be found in Section 4. Basic tumor pathology is presented in Section 5. Section 6 provides a glossary of terms associated with carcinogenesis. Information pertaining to cancer in humans can be found in the chapter on Risk Assessment elsewhere in this book.