Germline variation of circadian pathway genes and prognosis of gastric cancer patients

As we have summarised in this journal,1 germline DNA variation has been long recognised as a key component of the risk to develop to gastric carcinoma, the discovery pace being greatly accelerated by genome-wide association studies.2 More recently, growing evidence is accumulating also on the association between genetic variation and prognosis of patients with gastric cancer.3 4 Furthermore, investigators have demonstrated that alterations of the circadian rhythm can predispose to a variety of illnesses, including different types of malignancies and gastrointestinal diseases.5 6 Putting together these observations, we studied the relationship between circadian genes germline variation and the overall survival of 460 patients with TNM stage I to IV gastric carcinoma. We considered 21 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of 14 circadian pathway genes. Genotyping was performed with real-time quantitative PCR using patient peripheral blood samples. Expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) analysis was employed to …