It may be assumed that the low incidence of cervical cancer in Israeli Jewish women and the differences between the ethnic groups may be related to the frequency pattern of the homozygous arginine p53 polymorphism
In this study, undertaken at King Edward VIII Hospital, Durban, South Africa, we determined the p53 codon 72 status in 281 black South African women with cervical cancer and 340 ethnically matched healthy control subjects.
No relationship observed between human p53 codon-72 genotype and HPV-associated cervical cancer in a population group with a low arginine-72 allele frequency.
In additional, interaction between these p53 and p21 polymorphisms increased the risk of cervical cancer in a multiplicative manner, with the OR being 3.96 (95% CI, 1.51-10.41) for subjects carrying both p53 Arg/Arg and p21 Ser/Ser genotypes.
Results from the current meta-analysis suggests that p53 codon 72 polymorphism might be associated with increased risk of cervical cancer, especially among Indians.
An association between codon-72 p53 polymorphism and risk of human papillomavirus (HPV)-induced cervical cancer has been found recently, but it has been difficult to replicate.
The Arg>Pro polymorphism in codon 72 of p53 gene is known to affect the susceptibility of cervical cancer differently in different population worldwide although information regarding its role in determining survival status and disease outcome in patients is lacking.
A. Storey et al.[Nature (Lond.), 393: 229-234, 1998)] reported a 7-fold increased risk of cervical cancer associated with having an Arg/Arg polymorphism at codon 72 of p53 compared with the Pro/Arg heterozygotes (odds ratio, 7.4; 95% confidence interval, 2.1-29.4).
The p53 codon 72 arginine allele showed a suggestive negative association with cervical cancer (HET, OR = 0.49; 95% CI, 0.14-1.63; homozygotes, OR = 0.35; 95% CI, 0.11-1.17).
The aim of this study was to elucidate the prevalence of HPV, especially HPV 16, in cervical cancer patients and in healthy women, to investigate the distribution of p53 gene 72 codon polymorphism and to correlate these to cervical cancer risk in Lithuanian women.
Some authors assert that the discrepancy in the results could not be attributed to differences in the methods; however, the Brazilian study emphasized the effect of inter-laboratory variation in detecting the association between p53 polymorphism and cervical cancer.
Thus, polymorphism of the p53 itself as well as in combination with HPV infection may not be a genetic risk for cervical cancer and therefore much attention should be paid to other risk factors such as sexual behavior and smoking.
CP-31398, a styrylquinazoline, emerges from a screen for therapeutic agents that restore the wild-type DNA-binding conformation of mutant p53 to suppress tumors in vivo, but its effects on cervical cancer (CC) remain unknown.
Recently, it has been demonstrated that the presence of homozygous arginine at codon 72 renders p53 about seven times more susceptible to E6-mediated proteolytic degradation as well as to cervical cancer than those with proline homozygotes or proline/arginine heterozygotes.
Thus, our investigation of a larger set of clinical samples does not support the proposed association of any polymorphic status of p53 at codon 72 with an elevated risk for cervical cancer.
The purpose of this study was to analyze the association of 29 candidate single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in genes in the DNA repair pathway, TP53, and TP53BP1 with the risk of cervical cancer.