Background: The magnitude of risk conferred by the interaction between tobacco and alcohol use on the risk of head and neck cancers is not clear because studies have used various methods to quantify the excess head and neck cancer burden. Methods: We analyzed individual-level pooled data from 17 European and American case-control studies (11,221 cases and 16,168 controls) participating in the International Head and Neck Cancer Epidemiology consortium. We estimated the multiplicative interaction parameter (y) and population attributable risks (PAR). Results: A greater than multiplicative joint effect between ever tobacco and alcohol use was observed for head and neck cancer risk (y = 2.15; 95% confidence interval, 1.53-3.04). The PAR for tobacco or alcohol was 72% (95% confidence interval, 61-79%) for head and

Poor oral health has been reported as a risk factor in the etiology of head and neck cancer. Data on oral health were ascertained as part of two multicenter case-control studies comprising 924 cases and 928 controls in central Europe and 2,286 cases and 1,824 controls in Latin America. Incident cases of squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (oral cavity, pharynx, larynx) and esophagus, as well as age (in quinquennia)- and sex frequency-matched controls, were enrolled from 1998 to 2003. Poor condition of the mouth (central Europe: odds ratio (OR) = 2.89, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.74, 4.81; Latin America: OR = 1.89, 95% CI: 1.47, 2.42), lack of toothbrush use (Latin America: OR = 2.36, 95% CI: 1.28, 4.36), and daily mouthwash use (Latin America: OR = 3.40, 95% CI: 1.96, 5.89) emerged as risk factors for head and neck cancer, independent of tobacco use and alcohol consumption. Missing between six and 15 teeth was an independent risk factor for esophageal cancer (central Europe: OR = 2.84, 95% CI: 1.26, 6.41; Latin America: OR = 2.18, 95% CI: 1.04, 4.59). These results indicate that periodontal disease (as indicated by poor condition of the mouth and missing teeth) and daily mouthwash use may be independent causes of cancers of the head, neck, and esophagus.

Sexual behaviours are associated with cancer risk at the head and neck cancer subsites that have previously been associated with HPV infection.

We conducted a genome-wide association study of oral cavity and pharyngeal cancer in 6,034 cases and 6,585 controls from Europe, North America and South America; we detected 8 loci (P<5x10–8), 7 of which are novel for these cancer sites. Oral and pharyngeal cancers combined were associated with loci at 6p21.32 (rs3828805, HLA-DQB1), 10q26.13 (rs201982221, LHPP) and 11p15.4 (rs1453414, OR52N2/TRIM5). Oral cancer was associated with two new regions 2p23.3 (rs6547741, GPN1) and 9q34.12 (rs928674, LAMC3), and with known cancer loci: 9p21.3 (rs8181047, CDKN2B-AS1) and 5p15.33 (rs10462706, CLPTM1L). Oropharyngeal cancer associations were limited to the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region and classical HLA allele imputation revealed a protective association with the class II haplotype DRB1*1301-DQA1*0103-DQB1*0603 (odds ratio (OR)=0.59, P=2.7x10–9). Stratified analyses on a subgroup of oropharyngeal cases with human papillomavirus (HPV) status indicated that this association was considerably stronger in HPV-positive (OR=0.23, P=1.6x10–6) compared to HPV-negative cancers (OR=0.75, P=0.16).

contributed to the design and execution of the overall study. M.P.P., M.J., J.R.T., G.S., L.E.M., L.A.K., X.W., V.G., K.B.J., J.D.M., N.R., S.J.C., and P Brennan contributed to the statistical analysis. M.P.P., M.J., S.J.C. and P. Brennan wrote the first draft of the manuscript. D. Zeleniak, E.P., L.A.K., X.W., K.B.J., S.H.V., S.L.M., Y.Y., A.M.M., E.S.B., N.N.C., M.F., D.L., I.G., S.H., H. Blanche, A.H., G.T., Z.W., M.Y., K.G.S., S.J.C., and M.L. supervised or conducted the genotyping. The remaining authors conducted the epidemiologic studies and contributed samples to the GWAS and/or replication. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptNat Genet. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2012 January 1. AbstractWe conducted a two-stage genome-wide association study of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) in 3,772 cases and 8,505 controls of European background from 11 studies, and followed up 6 SNPs in three replication studies of 2,198 cases and 4,918 controls. Two loci on the regions of 2p21 and 11q13.3 were associated with RCC susceptibility below genome-wide significance. Two correlated variants (r 2 = 0.99 in controls), rs11894252 (P = 1.8×10 −8 ) and rs7579899 (P = 2.3×10 −9 ), map to EPAS1 on 2p21, which encodes hypoxia-inducible-factor-2 alpha, a transcription factor previously implicated in RCC. The second locus, rs7105934, at 11q13, contains no characterized genes (P = 7.8×10 −14 ). In addition, we observed a promising association on 12q24.31 for rs4765623 which maps to the scavenger receptor class B, member 1 (SCARB1) gene (P = 2.6×10 −8 ). Our study reports novel genomic regions associated with RCC risk that may lead to new etiological insights. Table 1, Online Methods and Supplementary note). All subjects from the IARC/CNG study were genotyped at the CNG with the exception of 305 cases and 323 controls from Russia that were genotyped at the Center "Bioengineering" and at the "Kurchatov Institute" in Moscow. All subjects from the NCI study were scanned at the NCI Core Genotyping Facility. In addition, 1,438 controls from the Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium were genotyped at the Sanger Institute, UK 10 . All RCC cases were defined on the basis of the International Classification of Diseases for Oncology, Second Edition (ICD-O-2), and included all cancers that were coded as C64.Comparable quality control metrics were applied to the two scanned data sets and following sample and SNP exclusions, genotype data for up to 577,547 SNPs were available for 2,461 cases and 5,081 controls in the IARC/CNG scan, while data for 585,576 SNPs were available for 1,311 cases and 3,424 controls in the NCI scan (Online Methods). Primary analyses were conducted using unconditional logistic regression models for genotype trend effects (1 degree of freedom) and adjusted for sex, country, eigenvectors, and study for the USA (Online Methods). In order to compute summary findings across both scans, a metaanalysis was performed using a fixed effects model with inverse variance wei...