Kazakhstan is a country in Central Asia with a high rate of gastric cancer. The development of gastric cancer is predisposed by a combination of genetic and environmental factors including dietary habits. With the advance of genetics, it was recently reported, that changes in the nucleotide composition of DNA (polymorphisms) in several genes (TNF, IL10, TP53, and CD14) might determine individual susceptibility to gastric cancer.
Therefore, the group of scientists from National Center for Biotechnology and the City Oncology Center, Nur-Sultan, tried to assess how those genetic changes predispose the development of gastric cancer in a Kazakh population in their study published in the journal BJBMS.
Their results support a hypothesis that the polymorphisms are potentially associated with the pathogenesis of gastric cancer in the studied Kazakh population. This case-control study has enrolled 498 subjects, including 143 cases with gastric cancer and 355 controls without a history of gastric cancer in an anamnesis. The researchers have looked for six common polymorphisms in the aforementioned genes and found four significant associations. The polymorphisms rs1042522 of TP53 and rs1800896 of IL10 are associated with gastric cancer risk, while the polymorphisms IL10 rs1800872 and rs1800871 are protective of gastric cancer in the population of Kazakhs.
Although the result does not permit extrapolation to other ethnic groups, the present conclusion might provide potential genetic modifiers for gastric cancer in the Kazakh population.
These findings provide evidence of markers for gastric cancer risk with potential use in the diagnosis, prognosis, and prevention. Further studies of larger scale needed to validate and refine these results.
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Editor: Edna Skopljak
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