Ovarian cancer survival and polymorphisms in hormone and DNA repair pathway genes.

We evaluated the association between 21 polymorphisms in hormone and DNA repair pathway genes and survival among 454 Australian women diagnosed with invasive epithelial ovarian cancer. The cohort was followed for mortality using personal identifiers which were linked to state cancer registry records and the Australian National Death Index. The mean follow-up time after ovarian cancer diagnosis was 4.63 years (all women) and 8.07 years for the censored group (those alive or dead from non-ovarian cancer causes). Two hundred and eighty-eight (63%) ovarian cancer deaths occurred during the follow-up period. No association was observed for the vast majority of polymorphisms, but there was suggestive evidence for altered risk of ovarian cancer death associated with the CYP17 5'UTR C allele (HR 1.30; 95% CI=1.02-1.68, p= 0.04), and for the SRD5A2 V89L C allele (HR 0.79; 95% CI=0.62-1.01, p=0.06). These results are interesting given tentative evidence that both of these variants are also associated with increased predisposition to ovarian cancer in our extended Australian study, and in other published studies. However, given the marginal significance of these associations and the large number of tests performed, independent replication will be necessary to validate these novel findings.