Objective: To determine whether genetic polymorphisms in XRCC1 and XPC are associated with risk of pancreatic cancer.
Methods: A case-control study was conducted in 101 incident cases with pancreatic cancer and 337 controls (matched for age, sex and ethnicity) to investigate whether genetic polymorphisms in DNA repair genes XRCC1 (Arg194Trp and Arg399Gln) and XPC (an intronic biallelic poly (AT) insertion/deletion polymorphism, XPC-PAT) were associated with risk of pancreatic cancer. The odds ratios (ORs) and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated by unconditional logistic regression models and adjusted for potential confounding factors.
Results: There was a small, non-significant decrease in risk for pancreatic cancer in those carrying Gln/Gln genotype at XRCC1 Arg399Gln site (OR 0.64, 95% CI 0.21 - 1.66, P = 0.30) compared with those having Arg/Arg genotypes. And the XRCC1 Arg194Trp polymorphism was not significantly associated with risk of pancreatic cancer. For XPC-PAT polymorphism, 5.0% of cases and 13.4% of controls were homozygous for the variant allele (PAT+/+), resulting in an OR of 0.30 (95% CI 0.10 - 0.76, P = 0.02), which suggested that the PAT +/+ genotype might have protective effect against pancreatic carcinogenesis.
Conclusions: This study suggest that XPC-PAT polymorphisms may contribute to the risk of pancreatic cancer in our study population.