International journal of cancer. Journal international du cancer
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Multicenter Study
Circulating plasma phospholipid fatty acids and risk of pancreatic cancer in a large European cohort.
There are both limited and conflicting data on the role of dietary fat and specific fatty acids in the development of pancreatic cancer. In this study, we investigated the association between plasma phospholipid fatty acids and pancreatic cancer risk in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort. The fatty acid composition was measured by gas chromatography in plasma samples collected at recruitment from375 incident pancreatic cancer cases and375 matched controls. ⋯ Results were robust to a range of sensitivity analyses. Our findings suggest that higher circulating levels of saturated fatty acids with an odd number of carbon atoms and n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids may be related to lower risk of pancreatic cancer. The influence of some fatty acids on the development of pancreatic cancer may be sex-specific and modulated by smoking.
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The toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling pathway plays an important role in the innate immune responses and antigen-specific acquired immunity. Aberrant activation of the TLR pathway has a significant impact on carcinogenesis or tumor progression. Therefore, we hypothesize that genetic variants in the TLR signaling pathway genes are associated with overall survival (OS) of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). ⋯ Specifically, we identified IRAK2 rs779901 C > T as a predictor of NSCLC OS, with a variant-allele (T) attributed hazards ratio (HR) of 0.78 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.67-0.91, P = 0.001] in the PLCO dataset, 0.84 (0.72-0.98, 0.031) in the Harvard dataset, and 0.81 (0.73-0.90, 1.08x10-4 ) in the meta-analysis of these two GWAS datasets. In addition, the T allele was significantly associated with an increased mRNA expression level of IRAK2. Our findings suggest that IRAK2 rs779901 C > T may be a promising prognostic biomarker for NSCLC OS.