Oral presentation

Radiotherapy is an important weapon in the treatment of breast cancer, but normal tissue injury after radiotherapy can be a threat for patients. Genetic markers conferring the ability to identify hyper-sensitive patients at risk of normal tissue injury in advance would considerably improve therapy. Association studies on genetic variation and occurrence of normal tissue injury can help us identify such markers, but previous studies on the association between XRCC1 R399Q polymorphism and risk of normal tissue injury after radiotherapy in breast cancer patients report conflicting findings. We performed a meta-analysis to comprehensively evaluate the association between XRCC1 R399Q polymorphism and risk of normal tissue injury after radiotherapy in breast cancer patients. The pooled odds ratios (ORs) with their 95 % confidence interval (95 % CIs) were calculated to assess the strength of the association. Fourteen case–control studies with a total of 2,448 breast cancer cases were finally included into the meta-analysis. Overall, XRCC1 R399Q polymorphism was significantly associated with increased risk of normal tissue injury after radiotherapy under all three models (for QQ versus RR: fixed-effects OR?=?1.06, 95 % CI 1.00–1.13, P?=?0.050; for RQ versus RR: fixed-effects OR?=?1.05, 95 % CI 1.00–1.10, P?=?0.047; for QQ/RQ versus RR: fixed-effects OR?=?1.26, 95 % CI 1.01–1.58, P?=?0.041). The meta-analysis suggests that XRCC1 R399Q polymorphism was significantly associated with increased risk of normal tissue injury after radiotherapy in breast cancer patients, and XRCC1 R399Q polymorphism is a genetic marker of normal tissue injury after radiotherapy in breast cancer patients.