Two susceptibility loci for gastric cancer newly identified

Last Updated: 2016-01-05

By Reuters Staff

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Two newly identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are associated with an increased risk of non-cardia gastric adenocarcinoma in Chinese individuals, according to a new analysis.

Dr. Hongbing Shen, from Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China, and colleagues combined results from two previously published genome-wide association studies (GWAS) with their own GWAS of 3,564 cases and 4,637 controls in an effort to identify additional genetic signals associated with non-cardia gastric adenocarcinoma.

They identified two novel risk loci: rs7712641 at 5q14.3 and rs80142782 at 1q22.

There are no protein-coding genes within the 1 MB of rs7712641, but it is located in the intron of a long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) that is poorly characterized. Preliminary evidence suggests that this lncRNA could function like a tumor-suppression gene, but there was no association between expression of rs7712641 and the lncRNA in normal tissue.

rs80142782 is in the same region as another SNP, rs4072037, which has previously been associated with non-cardia gastric cancer, according to the December 23 online report in Gut.

The Asian-specific rs80142782 might act on the nearby ASH1L gene, which is frequently altered in lung cancer tumors, esophageal squamous cell tumors, and colorectal cancer cell lines.

"In the future, additional studies are warranted with larger sample size and/or with a design that considers heterogeneity of the gastric cancer where, for example, the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) recently reported four molecular subtypes for gastric cancer based on multi-omics profiling analyses," the authors concluded.

Dr. Shen did not respond to a request for comments.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and others supported this research. The authors reported no disclosures.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1OxesKa

Gut 2015.