Background: G protein-mediated signal transduction plays a key role in pathways of metastasis. A C/T polymorphism (dbSNP rs5443) at position 825 of the GNB3 gene has been described. Previous studies demonstrated an association between the GNB3 C825T genotype and different cancer entities.
Patients and methods: In this report genotyping for this marker was performed in 235 prostate cancer patients and 111 healthy control subjects. Clinical follow-up data were available for a subset of 197 patients.
Results: Neither significant evidence for differences in genotype distributions between the prostate cancer cases and controls (odds ratio CT/TT=0.94, 95% CI 0.58-1.51, p=.82) nor evidence for genotype differences in e.g. progression-free survival in the subset of patients was observable (hazard ratio CT/TT=0.77, 95% CI 0.44-1.37, p=.38). Similar results were obtained in the subgroup of patients with primary tumor stage ≤ pT2 N0 M0 undergoing radical prostatectomy.
Conclusion: Our data do not support an association between prostate cancer and the genotype of the GNB3 C825T polymorphism. This finding might either indicate a much smaller genetic effect undetectable with the given sample size or a possible hormone dependence of the disease superimposed on the potential effect of the GNB3 C825T genotype.