No relationship between ovarian cancer risk and progesterone receptor gene polymorphism in a population-based, case-control study in North Carolina.

Introduction The protective effects of pregnancy and OC use on ovarian cancer risk may be attributable to the action of progestins on the ovarian epithelium (1). It has been hypothesized that a PROGINS is associated with increased risk of ovarian cancer. The PROGINS polymorphism has functional significance (2) and was associated with ovarian cancer in a pooled German/Irish population (3). A study of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers found that the PROGINS allele was associated with a 2.4-times increased risk of ovarian cancer among the subgroup that had never used OCs (4). In contrast, no association between PROGINS and sporadic ovarian cancer risk has been identified in several studies with ORs ranging from 0.85 to 0.95 (5, 6). In light of these conflicting reports, we sought to investigate the hypothesis that the PROGINS allele is associated with increased ovarian cancer risk.