Genome-wide association studies identified loci contribute to phenotypic variance of gastric cancer

We read with great interest the article by Mocellin et al,1 who conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis that nominated 11 germline variants at nine loci significantly associated with gastric cancer (GC) with high level of summary evidence. Moreover, they also identified 38 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with intermediate quality significant associations. Most of these loci were resulted from hypothesis-driven studies based on biological relevance, but most of these studies were small sample size and might lead to publication bias. In order to further evaluate their relevance with GC in individual large studies, we analysed these variants directly or their strong linkage disequilibrium SNPs using existing genome-wide association study (GWAS) datasets (including 2631 cases and 4373 controls) in Chinese populations, including those from Nanjing and Beijing populations conducted by our group2 and from Henan and Shanxi populations conducted by the USA National Cancer Institute.3

After exclusion of the...

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