Abstract 4660: Association of longer telomere length with increased risk of chronic hepatitis B and hepatocelluar carcinoma

Abstract

Abstract Telomere, which consists of small tandem nucleotide repeats (5′-TTAGGG-3′ in human), plays a critical role in the maintenance of genomic stability in eukaryotic chromosomes. More and more findings have shown that alteration in telomere length was involved in some diseases, however whether the telomere length is associated with the development and/or progression of disease remains poorly understood. Here a case-control study was employed to illustrate the correlation of relative telomere length(RTL) with chronic hepatitis B(CHB) and hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC). In this study, 115 cases of HCC patients, 212 patients with chronic hepatitis B and 184 healthy controls well matched with age and gender were recruited. Genomic DNA was extracted from the peripheral blood leukocytes and fluorescence quantitative polymerase chain reaction(FQ-PCR) was used to detect the telomere repeated numbers. We found that the RTL in HCC group was the longest, followed by CHB patients group and healthy control group was the shortest, showing significant statistical differences. When compared with age, the RTLs of individuals who aged more than 50 years old were obvious shorter than those younger ones in the control group, but not in the HCC and CHB group. Moreover, individuals who had longer RTLs indicated a significant increased risk of chronic hepatitis B (OR: 1.83, 95%CI: 1.22-2.73), and the longest RTLs showed higher incidence of HCC (OR: 3.22, 95%CI: 2.01-5.17) when the healthy control was used as the reference group. Most importantly, when the chronic hepatitis B group was used as the reference group, individuals who had longer RTL also suffered a significant increased risk of HCC(OR: 1.58, 95%CI: 1.03-2.41). Our results suggest that longer RTL is associated with the increased risk of chronic hepatitis B and HCC, which indicates that telomere length might be involved in the development or progression of HCC, also RTL might be used as a potential predicator of HBV relative chronic liver disease and HCC. Citation Format: Qiang Ma, Jiajing Cai, Yan Cai, Yuan Xu, Fan Chang, Lei Xu, Xiaolan Guo. Association of longer telomere length with increased risk of chronic hepatitis B and hepatocelluar carcinoma. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2015 Apr 18-22; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2015;75(15 Suppl):Abstract nr 4660. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2015-4660