Genetic Variants at 6p21.1 and 7p15.3 and Ovarian Cancer Risk: a Case-control Study in Han Chinese Women

Ovarian cancer is the leading cause of death from gynecologic cancer in women worldwide (Kumar et al., 2011), with an estimation of 225,500 women diagnosed with ovarian cancer and 140,200 deaths in 2008 (Lowe et al., 2013). Several risk factors of ovarian cancer have already been identified, such as parity (Pasalich et al., 2013), never breastfeeding (Luan et al., 2013), endometriosis (Vargas-Hernandez 2013), tubal ligation (Cramer 2012), body mass index and height (BMI) (Olsen et al., 2013) and family history (Moorman et al., 2013). Furthermore, there is growing evidence suggesting that genetic variants may contribute to the susceptibility to ovarian cancer (Mohamed et al., 2013; Shen et al., 2013). Over the last several years, as a powerful method to investigate the genetic determinants of complex diseases, genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have successfully identified many genetic markers for susceptibility to cancers (Yang et al., 2013). Meanwhile,