Association of toll-like receptors polymorphisms and the risk of colorectal cancer in Chinese Han population

Background: Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2) has been proven to play an important role in Colorectal cancer (CRC) in previous studies. Polymorphic variants of TLR2 are thought to be predisposing factors for various cancers. A number of studies have tried to determine whether the polymorphism of TLR influences its expression, susceptibility to CRC, but no accordant result was obtained due to the heterogeneity of the genetic background among populations. The aim of this retrospective study was to evaluate variants affecting CRC in a Chinese Han population. Methods: We chose 4 tg SNPs from Hap Map data on TLR2. They were genotyped on a total of 248 CRC patients and 226 healthy controls. We identified the correlation between the polymorphisms and the risk of CRC. Single nucleotide polymorphism locus was genotyped using PCR-RFLP. Results: The association of rs11938228 genotype CA was significantly different (P=0.010, OR=1.933) between CRC patients and healthy controls. Furthermore, one haplotype GCAA) had a significantly higher frequency in patients (11/496=2.21%) than in controls (1/452=0.21%) (P=0.003; OR=11.387, 95% CI=1.465-88.524). Conclusions: The current study suggests that genetic variants rs11938228 in TLR2 might serve as candidate markers for susceptibility to CRC and haplotype GCAA of TLR2 gene is a risk factor for CRC patients in Chinese Han populations.