ABO Blood Group, Epstein-Barr virus Infection and Prognosis of Patients with Non-metastatic Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

Abstract

Asian Pac J Cancer Prev, 15 (17), [7459][7460][7461][7462][7463][7464][7465] Introduction Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a common head and neck malignant neoplasm, especially in southern China where the major pathological type of NPC is nonkeratinizing undifferentiated carcinoma (World Health Organization Type III) (Jemal et al., 2011;Huang et al., 2012). Several factors have been proved to enhance the risk of NPC, including Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), smoking, alcohol consumption, salt-preserved foods and family history of cancer, etc (Chien et al., 2001;Jia et al., 2010;Ji et al., 2011;Hashim et al., 2012).Extensive investigations have showed that the ABO blood group might be associated with risk to certain malignancies (Iodice et al., 2010;Gates et al., 2011;Joh et al., 2012;Wang et al., 2012;Zhang et al., 2014). A previous study suggested that blood type A or AB was associated with an increased risk of NPC and male patients with blood group A had higher rates of distant

Prognostic Correlations between ABO Blood Group and Pre-Treatment Plasma Epstein-Barr Virus DNA in Patients with Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Receiving Intensity-Modulated Radiotherapy

“…The A, B, AB and O blood group distribution of our study was similar to previous studies [11, 12]. Previous studies have resulted in controversy regarding the prognostic difference between A blood group and the non-A groups in NPC [11–13]. Therefore, in this analysis, the clinicopathological features and failure patterns were only compared between A blood and the non-A blood groups to clarify the differences between these groups.…”

“…Moreover, Zhang et al [13] showed high VCA-IgA level was associated with a favorable prognosis in male patients with stage II disease who had an A blood type (p = 0.008), compared with those with non-A blood type. The cohorts in these three studies were large and consisted of many basic prognostic factors like tumor stage and host factors.…”

“…Firstly, ABO blood group did not have prognostic value. Secondly, as plasma EBV DNA was not included in the survival analyses of previous studies [11–13], it is possible that any prognostic effect of blood group was diminished by the highly significant prognostic effect of plasma EBV DNA. In the current study, multivariate analysis further confirmed plasma EBV DNA was a powerful prognostic factor for DFS, OS, DMFS and LRRFS ( P ≤ 0.001 for all rates).…”

“…Seemingly, the ABO blood group may be a useful prognostic factor and it also plays an important role in NPC. However, outcomes from previous studies addressing this issue remain controversial [11–13] and therefore needs to be further investigated.…”

“…Over the last decade, plasma EBV DNA has been proven to be the most successful biomarker for detecting and predicting prognosis in NPC [16–20]. Moreover, Zhang et al [13] demonstrated that male patients with stage II/III NPC, blood group A and high immunoglobulin A antibodies to EBV viral capsid antigen (VCA-IgA) level had a favorable prognosis. Therefore, it is reasonable to hypothesize that a potential prognostic relationship may exist between the ABO blood group and the pre-treatment EBV DNA (pre-DNA) level in NPC.…”