Association between common variants in vitamin D receptor gene and susceptibility to Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma: a case-control study

Abstract

Vitamin D (VDR)-mediated signaling contributes to the cell signaling pathways that affect cancer development. This study is conducted on 104 patients diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) and 246 healthy subjects to investigate the link between five genetic variants spanning the VDR gene and the risk of this malignancy in Iranian subjects. The PCR-RFLP method was used for the analysis of BsmI (rs1544410), ApaI (rs7975232), FokI (rs2228570) and TaqI (rs731236) variants. A simple Tetra-ARMS-PCR technique was employed for the genotyping of the Cdx2 (rs11568820) variant. No significant link was found between both groups regarding ApaI (rs7975232) and FokI (rs2228570) variants (P > 0.05). Also, different genetic models of TaqI (rs731236), BsmI (rs1544410) and Cdx2 (rs11568820) polymorphisms were significantly correlated to decreased risk of NHL (Odd ratios <1). We found three haplotypes were strongly associated with an increased risk of NHL (P < 0.0001). Linkage-disequilibrium (LD) analysis showed a strong linkage between TaqI (rs731236) and BsmI (rs1544410) among NHL case and control subjects. Our findings indicated that functional variants of the VDR gene are linked to a decreased risk of NHL in our population. Further replication studies in different ethnic groups are needed to validate our results.

Keywords:

• Vitamin D receptor
• non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma
• restriction fragment length polymorphism

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the staff at the infectious diseases and tropical medicine research center of Zahedan University of Medical Sciences for their assistance.

Declaration of interest statement

All authors declare no competing financial interests exist.