Association of ABCB1 and SLC22A16 gene polymorphisms with incidence of doxorubicin-induced febrile neutropenia: A survey of iranian breast cancer patients

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide. Doxorubicin-based chemotherapy is used to treat breast cancer patients; however, neutropenia is a common hematologic side effect and can be life-threatening. The ABCB1 and SLC22A16 genes encode proteins that are essential for doxorubicin transport. In this study, we explored the effect of 2 common polymorphisms in ABCB1 (rs10276036 C/T) and SLC22A16 (rs12210538 A/G) on the development of grade 3/4 febrile neutropenia in Iranian breast cancer patients. Our results showed no significant association between these polymorphisms and grade 3/4 febrile neutropenia; however, allele C of ABCB1 (rs10276036 C/T) (p = 0.315, OR = 1.500, 95 CI = 0.679-3.312) and allele A of SLC22A16 (rs12210538 A/G) (p = 0.110, OR = 2.984, 95 CI = 0.743-11.988) tended to have a greater association with grade 3/4 febrile neutropenia, whereas allele T of ABCB1 (rs10276036) (p = 0.130, OR = 0.515, 95 CI = 0.217-1.223) and allele G of SLC22A16 (rs12210538) (p = 0.548, OR = 0.786, 95 CI = 0.358-1.726) tended to protect against this condition. In addition to breast cancer, a statistically significant association was also observed between the development of grade 3/4 febrile neutropenia and other clinical manifestations such as stage IIIC cancer (p = 0.037) and other diseases (p = 0.026). Our results indicate that evaluation of the risk of grade 3/4 neutropenia development and consideration of molecular and clinical findings may be of value when screening for high-risk breast cancer patients. © 2016 Faraji et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited