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Association studies for finding cancer-susceptibility genetic variants

Key Points

  • The polygenic model for cancer susceptibility indicates that much of the inherited risk of cancer is due to multiple risk alleles, each with a low to moderate risk. The number of such alleles for any specific cancer is unknown, but might be in the hundreds or thousands.

  • Although linkage studies have been highly successful in mapping the genes that underlie monogenic disorders, these studies are of limited use for investigating predisposition to polygenic disease, such as cancer. Genetic-association studies — or case–control studies — provide an efficient design for identifying common genetic variants that confer modest disease risks.

  • Few convincing cancer-susceptibility alleles have been identified so far using the genetic-association study design. The limited success of these studies can be attributed mainly to the use of small study sizes — which provide insufficient statistical power and give a high rate of false positives — and limitations in the selection of candidate genes.

  • The rapid acquisition of data on the occurrence of common single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) has made it possible to test for the association of a candidate gene or region with disease using a tagging-SNP approach.

  • Several approaches can be used to increase the efficiency of candidate-gene association studies, such as improving the selection of candidate genes that are likely to be associated with cancer predisposition and enriching for genetic susceptibility by studying families with a history of cancer.

  • A combination of cheaper genotyping technologies with efficient study design will make empirical, whole-genome studies a feasible prospect in the near future.

  • Elucidating how multiple susceptibility alleles interact with each other and with lifestyle and environmental factors will be a key future challenge for the molecular and genetic epidemiology of cancer predisposition.

Abstract

Cancer is the result of complex interactions between inherited and environmental factors. Known genes account for a small proportion of the heritability of cancer, and it is likely that many genes with modest effects are yet to be found. Genetic-association studies have been widely used in the search for such genes, but success has been limited so far. Increased knowledge of the function of genes and the architecture of human genetic variation combined with new genotyping technologies herald a new era of gene mapping by association.

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Figure 1: The number of alleles required to explain the excess familial risk of a typical common cancer according to alleles with different frequencies and conferring different risks.
Figure 2: The stages in the design of an association study for cancer-susceptibility genes.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the referees and editors, whose comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript were very helpful.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

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Correspondence to Bruce A. J. Ponder.

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Related links

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DATABASES

Entrez Gene

ATM

BRCA1

BRCA2

CDKN2A

CHEK2

CTLA4

CYP19

MLH1

MSH2

NOD2

PTEN

TP53

National Cancer Institute

breast cancer

colorectal cancer

gastric cancer

melanoma

ovarian cancer

OMIM

adenomatosis polyposis coli

multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2

type 1 diabetes

FURTHER INFORMATION

Fred Hutchinson Center Seattle SNPs Program

International HapMap Project

National Cancer Institute Consortium of Cohorts

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Environmental Genome Project SNPs Program

Glossary

PENETRANCE

The frequency with which individuals who carry a given mutation show the manifestations associated with that mutation. If the penetrance of a disease allele is 100%, then all individuals carrying that allele will express the associated phenotype.

LINKAGE STUDIES

A statistical method in which the genotypes and phenotypes of parents and offspring in families are studied to determine whether two or more loci are assorting independently or exhibiting linkage during meiosis.

PHENOCOPY

A non-hereditary alteration in phenotype, induced by environmental factors such as nutritional status, that mimics the phenotype produced by a specific gene.

POLYMORPHISM

A polymorphism is the existence of two or more variants (alleles, sequence variants, chromosomal structural variants) at significant frequencies in the population. It is conventional for a genetic variant with a frequency of >1% to be called a polymorphism.

HAPLOTYPE

The physical arrangement of multiple alleles along a chromosome or segment of a chromosome.

TANDEM-REPEAT POLYMORPHISM

A tandem repeat is two or more copies of the same DNA sequence arranged in a direct head to tail succession along a chromosome. The number of copies of the repeat might vary in the population.

RESTRICTION FRAGMENT LENGTH POLYMORPHISM

A polymorphic difference in DNA sequence between individuals that can be recognized by restriction endonucleases.

SINGLE-NUCLEOTIDE POLYMORPHISM

Any polymorphic variation at a single nucleotide (base) in the genome.

RELATIVE RISK

The relative risk of disease associated with a particular risk factor (also known as an exposure), such as a particular genotype, is the ratio of the incidence of disease in individuals with that risk factor to the incidence of disease in individuals without the risk factor.

HAPLOTYPE RESOLUTION

The estimation of haploype frequencies in a population is complicated by the fact that haplotypes for diploid data are not usually directly observable. Haplotypes can be resolved (inferred) by using parental genotype data or estimated by using statistical estimation.

LINKAGE PEAKS

In a whole-genome linkage analysis, the strength of linkage at any given marker is given by the log of odds (LOD) score. A high LOD score at one or several adjacent markers can be called a linkage peak.

CONGENIC STRAIN

A congenic strain is derived by mating mice carrying a locus of interest in each succeeding generation to mice of an inbred strain. A fully congenic strain and the inbred partner are expected to be identical at all loci except for the transferred locus and a linked segment of chromosome.

SYNTENY

The physical presence of two or more genetic loci on the same chromosome, whether or not they are close enough together to demonstrate linkage.

FOUNDER

When a population expands from a limited number of individuals, those individuals are known as founders. The founder effect is when a particular allele is frequent in a population derived from a small number of founders.

MULTIFACTOR-DIMENSIONALITY REDUCTION

Uses case-control data to pool multilocus genotypes into either a high-risk or a low-risk group, effectively reducing the number of genotype predictors to one. The new one-dimensional multilocus genotype can then be evaluated to classify and predict disease status.

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Pharoah, P., Dunning, A., Ponder, B. et al. Association studies for finding cancer-susceptibility genetic variants. Nat Rev Cancer 4, 850–860 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrc1476

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