Identification of susceptibility loci for cervical carcinoma by genome scan of affected sib-pairs

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Abstract
Cervical cancer is caused by a combination of environmental and genetic risk factors. Infection by oncogenic types of human papillomavirus is recognized as the major environmental risk factor and epidemiological studies indicate that host genetic factors predispose to disease development. A number of genetic susceptibility factors have been proposed, but with exception of the human leukocyte antigen CHLA, class II, have not shown consistent results among studies. We have performed the first genomewide linkage scan using 278 affected sib-pairs to identify loci involved in susceptibility to cervical cancer. A two-step qualitative non-parametric linkage analysis using 387 microsatellites with an average spacing of 10.5 cM revealed excess allelic sharing at nine regions on eight chromosomes. These regions were further analysed with 125 markers to increase the map density to 1.28 cM. Nominal significant linkage was found for three of the nine loci [9q32 (maximum lod-score, MLS) =1.95, PPPTSCOT). Analyses of TSCOT single nucleotide polymorphisms further strengthen the linkage to this region (MLS=2.40, PTSCOT is a candidate gene potentially involved in the genetic predisposition to this disease.