Human genome epidemiology （HUGE） uses sys- tematic applications of epidemiologic methods to as- sess the impact of human genetic variation on health and disease. In the past ten years, human genome epi- demiology has made great progresses along with ad- vances in genomics technologies, which make it pos- sible for the examination of genetic variants in a large sample size at a sufficiently low cost. Genetic associa- tion study in population provides a powerful approach to identify variants or genes associated with disease of interest by comparing distributions of genetic variants between affected and unaffected individuals.
MET tyrosine kinase and its ligand,hepatocyte growth factor（HGF）,play a pivotal role in the activties of tumor cells.A germline missense variant in exon 2 of the MET gene,N375S（rs33917957 A〉G）,may alter the binding affinity of MET for HGF and thus modify the risk of tumorigenesis.In this study,we performed a case-control study to assess the association between N375S and gastric cancer risk in 1,681 gastric cancer cases and 1,858 cancer-free controls.Logistic regression analysis was applied to estimate crude and adjusted odds ratios（ORs） and 95% confidence intervals（CIs） for the associations between genotypes and gastric cancer risk.We found that MET N375S variant genotypes（NS/SS） were associated with a significantly decreased risk of gastric cancer（OR = 0.78,95% CI = 0.63-0.96,P = 0.021） compared with the wildtype homozygote（NN）.The finding indicates that this germline variant in MET may decrease gastric cancer susceptibility in Han Chinese.
Yao LiuQin ZhangChuanli RenYanbing DragGuangfu JinZhibin HuYaochu XuHongbing Shen
