A case–control study on the effect of Apolipoprotein E genotypes on gastric cancer risk and progression

BMC Cancer

Research Article

Roberto Persiani¹  Alberto Biondi¹  Domenico D’Ugo¹  Ferdinando Cananzi¹  Gualtiero Ricciardi²  Emma De Feo²  Rosarita Amore²  Benedetto Simone²  Dario Arzani²  Stefania Boccia³ 

[1] Department of Surgery, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Rome, Italy;Institute of Hygiene, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Rome, Italy;Institute of Hygiene, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Rome, Italy;IRCCS San Raffaele Pisana, Rome, Italy;

关键词: Gastric cancer;    Apolipoprotein E;    Genetic epidemiology;    Polymorphism;    Gene-environment interaction;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2407-12-494

 received in 2012-03-08, accepted in 2012-10-11,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundApolipoprotein E (ApoE) is a multifunctional protein playing both a key role in the metabolism of cholesterol and triglycerides, and in tissue repair and inflammation. The ApoE gene (19q13.2) has three major isoforms encoded by ε2, ε3 and ε4 alleles with the ε4 allele associated with hypercholesterolemia and the ε2 allele with the opposite effect. An inverse relationship between cholesterol levels and gastric cancer (GC) has been previously reported, although the relationship between apoE genotypes and GC has not been explored so far.MethodsOne hundred and fifty-six gastric cancer cases and 444 hospital controls were genotyped for apoE polymorphism (ε2, ε3, ε4 alleles). The relationship between GC and putative risk factors was measured using the adjusted odds ratios (ORs) and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) from logistic regression analysis. A gene-environment interaction analysis was performed. The effect of the apoE genotypes on survival from GC was explored by a Kaplan–Meier analysis and Cox proportional hazard regression model.ResultsSubjects carrying at least one apoE ε2 allele have a significant 60% decrease of GC risk (OR=0.40, 95% CI: 0.19 – 0.84) compared with ε3 homozygotes. No significant interaction emerged between the ε4 or ε2 allele and environmental exposures, nor ε2 or ε4 alleles affected the median survival times, even after correcting for age, gender and stadium.ConclusionsOur study reports for the first time a protective effect of the ε2 allele against GC, that might be partly attributed to the higher antioxidant properties of ε2 compared with the ε3 or ε4 alleles. Given the study’s sample size, further studies are required to confirm our findings.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© De Feo et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.