Abstract
Aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) is an important environmental carcinogen in the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). HCC is a complex disease likely resulting from polymorphisms in multiple interacting genes and gene-environment interactions. Recent efforts have been made to analyze the associations between risk of this malignancy and hereditary sequence variations in genes involved in the repair of DNA damage induced by AFB1. Here, we reviewed the results of published case-control studies that have examined the effects of common alleles of all susceptible DNA repair genes, including XRCC1, XRCC3, XRCC4, XRCC7, XPC, and XPD, on the risk of AFB1-related HCC. Statistically significant differences in genotype frequencies found in case-control comparisons were the rs25487, rs80309960, rs861539, rs7003908, rs28383151, rs3734091, rs13181, and rs2228001 polymorphisms. The overall effects of these genetic polymorphisms were moderate in terms of relative risk, with ORs ranging from 2 to 10. Furthermore, some evidence that genetic polymorphisms in certain carcinogen genes modulate the risk of this cancer was also found, although this requires confirmation by studies with larger sample sizes (Am J Transl Med. 2017. 1:9-25).