Impact of interleukin-6 -174 G>C gene promoter polymorphism on neuroblastoma

Common variants in DNA may predispose to onset and progression of neuroblastoma (NB). The genotype GG of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs1800795 (-174 G>C) in interleukin (IL)-6 promoter has been associated with lower survival of high-risk NB.

To evaluate the impact of IL-6 SNP rs1800795 on disease risk and phenotype, we analyzed 326 Italian NB patients and 511 controls. Moreover, we performed in silico and quantitative Real Time (qRT)-PCR analyses to evaluate the influence of the SNP on gene expression in 198 lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) and in 31 NB tumors, respectively. Kaplan-Meier analysis was used to verify the association between IL-6 gene expression and patient survival. We found that IL-6 SNP is not involved in susceptibility to NB development. However, our results show that a low frequency of genotype CC is significantly associated with a low overall survival, advanced stage, and high-risk phenotype. The in silico (p = 2.61 × 10(-5)) and qRT-PCR (p = 0.03) analyses showed similar trend indicating that the CC genotype is correlated with increased level of IL-6 expression. In report gene assay, we showed that the -174 C variant had a significantly increased transcriptional activity compared with G allele (p = 0.0006). Moreover, Kaplan-Meier analysis demonstrated that high levels of IL-6 are associated with poor outcome in children with NB in two independent gene expression array datasets.

The biological effect of SNP IL-6-174 G>C in relation to promotion of cancer progression is consistent with the observed decreased survival time. The present study suggests that SNP IL-6-174 G>C may be a useful marker for NB prognosis.