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Background: Mitochondria are involved in many processes that are central to the life and death of a cell. Oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS), in particular, is known to be altered in carcinogenesis, leading to an increase in the production of reactive oxidative species and glycolysis, one of the hallmarks of cancer cells. Because of this, genetic variation in the mitochondrial genome, which encodes for part of the OXPHOS pathway, has been suggested to play a role in many cancers, including prostate cancer., Methods: We comprehensively examined the role of the mitochondrial genome and prostate cancer risk in 4,086 prostate cancer cases and 3,698 controls from the Multiethnic Cohort (MEC), testing 350 mitochondrial SNPs (mtSNPs) in five racial/ethnic populations-Africans, Asian Americans, Europeans, Latinos, and Native Hawaiians. Logistic regression was conducted to examine single mitochondrial SNP and haplogroup associations. The sequence kernel association test was conducted for gene and pathway analysis., Results: Eleven mtSNPs and haplogroup N were nominally associated with overall prostate cancer risk at P < 0.05. The mitochondrial DNA-encoded OXPHOS pathway, complexes, and genes were not associated with prostate cancer risk. No significant associations were identified after multiple testing corrections (all FDR q > 0.20)., Conclusions: The mitochondrial genome was not associated with prostate cancer risk in our study of 7,784 subjects from the MEC., Impact: Our comprehensive study does not support the role of the mitochondrial genome in the risk of prostate cancer. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 25(6); 1001-3. ©2016 AACR., (©2016 American Association for Cancer Research.)

Objective: Genome-wide association studies have identified a large number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with a wide array of cancer sites. Several of these variants demonstrate associations with multiple cancers, suggesting pleiotropic effects and shared biological mechanisms across some cancers. We hypothesised that SNPs previously associated with other cancers may additionally be associated with colorectal cancer. In a large-scale study, we examined 171 SNPs previously associated with 18 different cancers for their associations with colorectal cancer., Design: We examined 13 338 colorectal cancer cases and 40 967 controls from three consortia: Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE), Genetic Epidemiology of Colorectal Cancer (GECCO), and the Colon Cancer Family Registry (CCFR). Study-specific logistic regression results, adjusted for age, sex, principal components of genetic ancestry, and/or study specific factors (as relevant) were combined using fixed-effect meta-analyses to evaluate the association between each SNP and colorectal cancer risk. A Bonferroni-corrected p value of 2.92×10(-4) was used to determine statistical significance of the associations., Results: Two correlated SNPs--rs10090154 and rs4242382--in Region 1 of chromosome 8q24, a prostate cancer susceptibility region, demonstrated statistically significant associations with colorectal cancer risk. The most significant association was observed with rs4242382 (meta-analysis OR=1.12; 95% CI 1.07 to 1.18; p=1.74×10(-5)), which also demonstrated similar associations across racial/ethnic populations and anatomical sub-sites., Conclusions: This is the first study to clearly demonstrate Region 1 of chromosome 8q24 as a susceptibility locus for colorectal cancer; thus, adding colorectal cancer to the list of cancer sites linked to this particular multicancer risk region at 8q24.