Association Analysis of Common Genetic Variations in MUC5AC Gene with the Risk of Non-cardia Gastric Cancer in a Chinese Population

Several lines of evidence suggest that genetic variation in MUC5AC gene might contribute to the risk of gastriccancer. We conducted a case-control study to evaluate the relationship between common genetic variations inMUC5AC gene and non-cardia gastric cancer using an LD-based tagSNP approach in Baotou, north-westernChina. We genotyped 12 tagSNPs by TaqMan method among 288 cases with non-cardia gastric cancer and 281normal controls. Unconditional logistic regression was used to calculate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidenceintervals (CIs) for non-cardia gastric cancer risk in association with alleles, genotypes and haplotypes. Weobserved that the frequencies of rs3793964 C allele and rs11040869 A allele were significantly lower in cases thanin controls. Meanwhile, minor allele homozygotes of rs3793964 and rs11040869 were significantly associated witha decreased risk of non-cardia gastric cancer when compared with their major allele homozygotes. Furthermore,a statistically significantly protective effect of rs885454 genotypes on non-cardia gastric cancer was also observed(for CT vs. CC: OR=0.581, 95%CI=0.408-0.829; for CT/TT vs. CC: OR=0.623, 95%CI=0.451-0.884). Our resultsindicated that some common genetic variations in the MUC5AC gene might have effects on the risk of non-cardiagastric cancer in our studied population.