Abstract
Though the pathogenesis of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is still
unknown, accumulating evidence has revealed that immune response plays a
vital part in the pathogenesis. Here, we investigated the involvement of
24 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of immuno-related genes,
including cytokines (IL2, IL4, IL9, IL-12A, IL-22, IFNG, and TGFB1),
transcriptional regulatory genes (TBX21, STAT1, STAT3, STAT5B, STAT6,
GATA3, FOXP3, and IRF4), and others (IL2RA IL6R NFKBIA), in 269 AML
inpatients and 200 healthy controls. Furthermore, we analyzed the
relationship between the SNPs and clinical characteristics.
Immuno-related SNP genotyping was performed on the Sequenom MassARRAY
iPLEX platform. All the SNPs in healthy controls were consistent with
Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium. All final p values were adjusted by
Bonferroni multiple testing. Our results showed that IL-22 (rs2227491)
was significantly associated with the white blood cell (WBC) counts.
STAT5B (rs6503691) showed a close relationship with the recurrent
genetic abnormalities in patients with AML. We verified the negatively
independent effect of age and risk of cytogenetics on overall survival
(OS). More importantly, the GG genotype of IL-12A (rs6887695) showed a
negative impact on AML prognosis independently. Furthermore, the
relative expression of IL-12 was decreased in GG genotype, no matter
under codominant or recessive model. However, no correlation was
observed between the SNPs mentioned above and disease susceptibility,
risk stratification, and survival. Our findings suggest that
immuno-related gene polymorphisms are associated with prognosis in AML,
which may perform as novel inspection targets for AML patients.