A variant in a gene involved with inflammation and the immune response is linked with a decreased risk of lung cancer. That is the finding of an analysis published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. The results add to the growing body of literature implicating these processes in the development of lung cancer.Meredith Shiels, PhD, MHS and Anil Chaturvedi, PhD, of the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, MD, and their colleagues analyzed 1,429 variants in inflammation- and immunity-related genes from 378 patients with lung cancer and 450 healthy controls from the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian (PLCO) cancer screening trial. The investigators observed a significant link between lung cancer and 81 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) located in 44 genes.
