Analyzing 395,793 samples shows significant association between rs999737 polymorphism and breast cancer

Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been conducted and reported the association between rs999737 polymorphism at 14q24.1 (RAD51L1) and breast cancer risk. Following studies investigated rs999737 polymorphism in European and Asian populations. However, some of these studies reported weak and no significant association. Here, we reevaluated this association using large-scale samples from previous 11 studies (n=395,793; 162,261 cases and 233,532 controls) from the PubMed database. We evaluated the genetic heterogeneity among the selected studies. The pooled odds ratio (OR) is calculated by the fixed effect model. All statistical tests for heterogeneity and meta-analysis were computed using R package. We did not identify significant heterogeneity among the included studies using the allele model (P=0.1314 and I (2)=33.4 %). We observed significant association between rs999737 and breast cancer using the allele model (P=2.47E - 35, OR=0.92, 95 % confidence interval (CI) 0.91-0.93). Our analysis further supports previous findings that the rs999737 polymorphism contributes to breast cancer susceptibility. We believe that our finding will be very useful for future genetic studies in breast cancer.