title: Molecular epidemiology of DNA repair gene polymorphisms and head and neck cancer.
abstract: Although tobacco and alcohol consumption are two common risk factors of head and neck cancer (HNC), other specific etiologic causes, such as viral infection and genetic susceptibility factors, remain to be understood. Human DNA is often damaged by numerous endogenous and exogenous mutagens or carcinogens, and genetic variants in interaction with environmental exposure to these agents may explain interindividual differences in HNC risk. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in genes involved in the DNA damage-repair response are reported to be risk factors for various cancer types, including HNC. Here, we reviewed epidemiological studies that have assessed the associations between HNC risk and SNPs in DNA repair genes involved in base-excision repair, nucleotide-excision repair, mismatch repair, double-strand break repair and direct reversion repair pathways. We found, however, that only a few SNPs in DNA repair genes were found to be associated with significantly increased or decreased risk of HNC, and, in most cases, the effects were moderate, depending upon locus-locus interactions among the risk SNPs in the pathways. We believe that, in the presence of exposure, additional pathway-based analyses of DNA repair genes derived from genome-wide association studies (GWASs) in HNC are needed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Genetic Toxicology, the Key Laboratory of Modern Toxicology of Ministry of Education, School of Public Health, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 211166, China; ; Department of Environmental Genomics, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Cancer Biomarkers, Prevention and Treatment, Cancer Center, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 211166, China;
authors.forename: Meilin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Haiyan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chu
authors.forename: Zhengdong
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Qingyi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Wei
keywords: DNA repair; genetic variation; genome-wide association study; head and neck cancer; molecular epidemiology