Potentially functional polymorphisms of the vascular endothelial growth factor gene and risk of gastric cancer.

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), the key mediator of angiogenesis, plays an important role in the development of different kind of tumors, including gastric cancer (GC). The aim of this study is to test the hypothesis that genetic variants of VEGF are associated with risk of GC. We genotyped four potentially functional polymorphisms (-2578C > A, -1498T > C, -634G > C, and +936C > T) of the VEGF gene in a population-based case-control study of 540 GC cases and 561 frequency-matched cancer-free controls in a high risk Chinese population. We found that none of the four polymorphisms or their haplotypes achieved significant difference in their distributions between GC cases and controls. Multiple logistic regression analyses revealed that GC risk was not significantly associated with the variant genotypes of the four VEGF polymorphisms as compared with their wild-type genotypes. In conclusion, our data did not support a significant association between VEGF SNPs and the risk of GC. (c) 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.