A common variant of PPARgammaPro12Ala correlates with the clinical outcome of pancreatic cancer patients

Recently published genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified a number of common genetic variations associated with susceptibility to pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), which can be mapped to core cancer signaling of PDAC. The peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPARgamma) signaling has been shown to be associated with various aspects of PDAC and a common variant of PPARgamma^Pro12Ala has been proposed as a novel risk allele. Thus, we aim to explore the clinical relevance of PPARgamma^Pro12Ala in a cohort of PDAC patients. In order to examine the frequency of PPARgamma^Pro12Ala in PDAC patients, pancreatic tissues from PDAC patients (506 patients retrieved from our tissue bank) were subjected to genomic DNA isolation and genotyped by high-resolution melting curve analysis and sequencing. In addition, the prevalence of the PPARgamma^Pro12Ala was correlated with clinical parameters of patients such as age, sex, tumor stage, grading and survival. In total, 27.6% of analyzed cases carried PPARgamma^Pro12Ala variant. The preliminary correlation analysis suggested that patients with PPARgamma^Pro12Ala had a tendence towards a shorter postoperative survival. Though the 1-year overall survival rate of PPARgamma^Pro12Ala was similar as the patients with wild-type PPARgamma, the 3- and 5-year overall survival rate is lower. Therefore, the further analysis in a large cohort of PDAC patients is warranted.