Background: Two genome-wide association studies on gastric cancer showed a previously unknown gastric cancer susceptible locus in PLCE1 at 10q23. We hypothesized that the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs2274223 A/G is associated with the survival rate of gastric cancer.
Methods: We genotyped the above SNP in 940 gastric cancer patients to investigate the association between the polymorphism and gastric cancer survival by the TaqMan method.
Results: We found that patients carrying PLCE1 rs2274223 AA genotype survived for a significantly shorter time than those carrying the AG and GG genotypes (log-rank P = 0.046). This significance was enhanced in the dominant model (AA vs. AG/GG, log-rank P = 0.014). Multivariate Cox regression analyses showed that the AG/GG genotypes were associated with a significantly decreased risk of death from gastric cancer [adjusted hazard ratio (HR) = 0.79, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.65-0.95]. Most of stratification analysis did not find an enhanced association between the same genotype and prognosis, except for patients with TNM stage III disease (HR = 0.63, 95% CI = 0.48-0.83).
Conclusion: Our findings showed that the PLCE1 SNP rs2274223 was associated with significantly improved gastric cancer survival in a Chinese population. Further functional studies are needed to validate our results.