Resumen
About 7% of all children?s malignancies are represented by the embryonal renal cancer Wilms tumor (WT). Since methylation imprinting alterations at multiple loci dictated by chromosome copy-number variations have been recently demonstrated in adult cancers, we investigated the presence of similar alterations in pediatric malignancies. Our results demonstrated that 35% of WT cases were affected by methylation abnormalities of multiple imprinted loci. However, differently from adult cancers, they were associated with either chromosome aberrations or normal chromosome profiles. Epigenotype?phenotype correlations indicated that these epimutations were more frequent in highly aggressive tumors, suggesting the use of multiple methylation imprinting defects as a new informative marker for WT.