We conducted a hospital-based case-control study in Japan to investigate whether genetic variations in the FTO gene were associated with pancreatic cancer risk.
The results suggested that FTOrs9939609 polymorphism was not significantly associated with the increased risk of cancer (OR = 1.01, 95 %CI 0.98-1.04), with the exception that a statistically significant association was found for pancreatic cancer (OR = 1.10, 95 %CI 1.03-1.19).
Overall, these results do not provide strong evidence that common variants underling T2D or related phenotypes also affect pancreatic cancer risk; however, associations for FTO, MTNR1B, BCL11A, and MADD variants warrant further investigation in larger studies.
We genotyped 15 single nucleotide polymorphisms of fat mass and obesity-associated (FTO), peroxisome proliferators-activated receptor gamma (PPARγ), nuclear receptor family 5 member 2 (NR5A2), AMPK, and ADIPOQ genes in 1,070 patients with pancreatic cancer and 1,175 cancer-free controls.