BACKGROUND Genetic association studies have revealed numerous polymorphisms conferring susceptibility to melanoma. We aimed to replicate previously discovered melanoma-associated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a Greek case-control population, and examine their predictive value. METHODS Based on a field synopsis of genetic variants of melanoma (MelGene), we genotyped 284 patients an...

BACKGROUND Risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) is higher among individuals with a family history or a prior diagnosis of other cancers. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have suggested that some genetic susceptibility variants are associated with multiple complex traits (pleiotropy). OBJECTIVE We investigated whether common risk variants identified in cancer GWAS may also increase the ris...

The TERT-CLPTM1L region of chromosome 5p15.33 is a multi-cancer susceptibility locus that encodes the reverse transcriptase subunit, hTERT, of the telomerase enzyme. Numerous cancer-associated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), including rs10069690, have been identified within the hTERT gene. The minor allele (A) at rs10069690 creates an additional splice donor site in intron 4 of hTERT, a...

Five novel prostate cancer risk loci were identified in a recent genome-wide association study (GWAS) of Japanese persons (Takata et al., Nat Genet. 2010;42(9):751-754). Those authors proposed that apart from population-specific linkage disequilibrium patterns, limitations of GWAS single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) prioritization and/or study design could explain the lack of identification of...

INTRODUCTION Polymorphic variants in the 5p15, 6p12, 6p21, and 15q25 loci were demonstrated to potentially contribute to lung cancer carcinogenesis. Therefore, this study was performed to assess the role of those variants in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) risk and prognosis in a Portuguese population. MATERIALS AND METHODS Blood from patients with NSCLC was prospectively collected. To per...

High nevus count is the strongest risk factor for melanoma, and although gene variants have been discovered for both traits, epigenetic variation is unexplored. We investigated 322 healthy human skin DNA methylomes associated with total body nevi count, incorporating genetic and transcriptomic variation. DNA methylation changes were identified at genes involved in melanocyte biology, such as RA...

BACKGROUND Several regions of the genome show pleiotropic associations with multiple cancers. We sought to evaluate whether 181 single-nucleotide polymorphisms previously associated with various cancers in genome-wide association studies were also associated with melanoma risk. METHODS We evaluated 2,131 melanoma cases and 20,353 controls from three studies in the Population Architecture usin...