Association of COX-2 8473T>C gene polymorphism with lung cancer risk.

Recently, we read with great interest the article by Liu et al, which was published in your journal (Liu et al., 2010). The aim of the study was to evaluate the impact of the COX-2 gene 8473T>C polymorphism on lung cancer risk. The results indicated that the COX-2 gene was a factor for suffering from lung cancer, especially of small cell type among Asians. After carefully reading the article, we noted several issues which should be considered. First, the authors appeared to have missed one paper published by Lim et al. (2010). The detailed search process was not well-documented. Second, evidence suggested that deviation from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) might reflect the presence of genotyping errors, population stratification, and selection bias in the controls (Boccia et al., 2010). Though, the authors stated that genotype frequencies of all studies in the controls were consistent with HWE, we found a significant deviation from HWE in one study(Liu et al., 2010). LETTER to the EDITOR