Clinical Significance of MYT1L Gene Polymorphisms in Chinese Patients with Gastric Cancer

BACKGROUND: Myelin transcription factor 1 (MYT1) and its homologue MYT1-like (MYT1L) are the two main members of MYT/NZF family transcription factors, which are highly related, share a high degree of identity and show similar regulatory functions in neural development. There are evidences from several cytology experiments showing that MYT1 is associated with carcinoma. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: In the present study, we genotyped 944 surgically resected gastric cancer patients by the SNaPshot method to explore the association of MYT1L rs17039396 polymorphism with survival of gastric cancer in a Chinese population. We found that cardia cancer patients carrying MYT1L rs17039396 GG genotype survived for a significantly shorter time than those carrying the GA genotype. This significance was enhanced in the dominant model (GG vs. GA/AA, log-rank P = 0.001), suggesting a potential protect role of the variant A allele. Multivariate Cox regression analyses showed that the AG/GG genotypes were associated with a significantly decreased risk of death from gastric cancer (adjusted hazard ratio (HR) = 0.57, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.40–0.81). Stratification analyses further showed that such protective effect was statistically significant in subgroups of patients with tumor size ≤5 cm (adjusted HR = 0.34, 95%CI = 0.19–0.64), well-moderate gastric cancer (adjusted HR = 0.59, 95%CI = 0.35–0.98), no lymph-node metastasis (adjusted HR = 0.49, 95%CI = 0.31–0.76), no distant metastasis (adjusted HR = 0.59, 95%CI = 0.41–0.84). CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: In conclusion, these data represents the first demonstration that MYT1L rs17039396 variants could indentified as a favorable prognostic indicator for gastric cancer, particularly among the cardia gastric cancer. Further validation in other larger studies with different ethnic populations and functional evaluations are needed.