rs328

A hospital-based case-control study in rural and urban India (1,204 cases; 1,212 controls) examined genetic and lifestyle risk factors for breast cancer. Four SNPs in FGFR2 (rs1219648, rs2420946, rs2981575, rs2981582) showed positive associations with breast cancer (ORs 1.32-1.47). Additional SNPs in obesity and metabolic genes (rs374748 in FBN2, rs2922763 in HNF4G, rs2116830 in KCNMA1, rs11121832 in MTHFR, rs16886165 in MAP3K1, rs11594610 in TCF7L2, rs2274459 in MLN) were associated with increased breast cancer risk. Waist-to-hip ratio ≥0.95 showed strong association (OR 3.78; 95% CI 2.92-4.89), and women living first 20 years in rural areas showed protective effect (OR 0.77).

This is a special issue of the Italian medical journal BeAdfiles (September 2012) dedicated to genetic conditioning in HIV and hepatitis virus infections. It reviews the major genetic polymorphisms that influence disease progression, treatment response, and drug toxicity in HIV and chronic hepatitis B and C infections, with particular emphasis on IL28B polymorphisms (rs809917 and others) predicting HCV treatment response to interferon-alpha and ribavirin therapy, and ITPA gene variants protecting against ribavirin-induced anemia. The issue also covers pharmacogenetic markers (CYP2B6, ABCB1, HLA-B*5701) and their clinical applications in antiretroviral therapy.

This longitudinal study of 4,554 participants from the Busselton Health Survey examined associations between four SNPs in APOA5, LPL, and GCK genes with glucose and lipid traits over time. Cross-sectional analyses confirmed that GCK rs1799884 was associated with fasting glucose (beta=0.01, p=0.003), APOA5 rs662799 and rs3135506 with triacylglycerol levels (p<0.0001), and LPL rs328 with reduced triacylglycerol and raised HDL-C. Longitudinal analyses (n=2,864) showed these genetic effects on lipid and glucose traits remain stable with age during adulthood.

This methodological study develops ProxyGeneLD software for converting genome-wide SNP association data to pathway-enriched gene sets and validates it on multiple large GWAS datasets. The authors demonstrate successful replication of pathway enrichment for plasma HDL levels (with CETP and ABCA1 in lipid metabolism pathways) across independent samples and identify positional gene clustering as a major source of spurious enrichment in pathway analyses of GWAS data.