Genetic susceptibility of lung cancer in Chinese population: An overview of systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

BACKGROUND: Genetic susceptibility of lung cancer has been widely studied for Chinese population, and meta-analysis of candidate gene association studies has also been performed for those genes. However, the overall evidence has not been well recognized.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate genetic association for the risk of lung cancer in Chinese.

METHOD: An overview of systematic reviews and meta-analyses of candidate gene association studies for lung cancer in Chinese was performed up to August 10th , 2016. The AMSTAR tool was used to assess the quality of the included systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Bibliometric analysis was performed to analyze the characteristics of reviews.

RESULTS: A total of 21 variants in 17 genes from 20 meta-analyses were included in this study. All 20 meta-analyses were published from 2011 to 2016. The quality scores of AMSTAR ranged from 3 to 7. All included genes were in the pathogenesis of lung cancer, such as the CYPs genes, GSTs genes, and base excision repair genes. Three polymorphisms were found to be associated with decreased risk of lung cancer for Chinese, 15 polymorphisms were found to be associated with increased risk of lung cancer for Chinese, but three polymorphisms were found to be not associated with lung cancer risk for Chinese.

CONCLUSION: The current study supports the genetic risk factors of lung cancer for Chinese are more likely to be variants from genes that contribute to the etiology of lung cancer.