The Investigation of WRAP53 rs2287499 Association with Thyroid Cancer Risk and Prognosis among the Azeri Population in Northwest Iran

Background: TP53 and the oncogene WRAP53 are adjoining genes, producing p53-WRAP53α sense-antisense RNA couples. WRAP53α is indispensable for p53 mRNA regulation and p53 induction following DNA damage. Up-regulated WRAP53β can induce neoplastic transformation and cancer cell survival. All these, along with the associations of WRAP53 single nucleotide polymorphisms with tumor incidence and prognosis, highlighted an impact in human cancers. Considering the importance of WRAP53 in modulating p53, and the frequent occurrence of thyroid cancer, we examined the association of a WRAP53 SNP (rs2287499) with thyroid cancer risk and prognosis among Iranian-Azeri population. Methods: This research was done in Tabriz-IRAN in 2014. DNA samples obtained from 106 patients and 196 controls were subjected to polymerase chain-reaction-based single-strand conformational polymorphism (PCR-SSCP) analysis. Genotypes were characterized by sequencing. Correlations of desired SNP with thyroid cancer as well as age, gender, involved thyroid lobe, lymph node metastasis, tumor type, stage, and size were estimated using Chi-square (χ2) or Fisher's exact tests with a P-value less than 0.05 as significant. Results: rs2287499 is not associated with thyroid cancer predisposition. Except for gender, none of the clinicopathologic factors were significantly linked to the examined genotypes. Conclusions: rs2287499 is not a genetic risk factor for thyroid cancer. Although rs2287499 is not assessable as a biomarker to predict prognosis based on clinicopathologic parameters, the considerable association with gender suggests that this SNP may indirectly be relevant to gender-associated disease manifestation. Further investigations on distinct types of thyroid tumors are needed to fully characterize the rs2287499 status in thyroid malignancies.