Re: Alcohol Dehydrogenase 3 Genotype and Risk of Oral Cavity and Pharyngeal Cancers

Extract

Recently, Harty et al. (1) reported in the Journal that alcohol dehydrogenase type 3 (ADH₃), a polymorphic enzyme that metabolizes ethanol to acetaldehyde, modified the risk of development of oropharyngeal cancers in a cohort of Puerto Ricans who had high levels of alcohol consumption.

We investigated whether these findings could be reproduced in another population, from part of a hospitalbased, case-control study performed in France among Caucasians (2). In our study, only case subjects (n = 165) with histologically confirmed squamous carcinoma of the oral cavity and pharynx were included. Control subjects (n = 234) were individuals without a history of cancer and were frequency matched for sex, age, and hospital.

The main conditions diagnosed among control subjects were rheumatologic (n = 74; 32%), infectious and parasitic (n = 24; 10%), respiratory (n = 21; 9%), cardiovascular (n = 19; 8%), and digestive (n = 14; 7%) diseases as well as traumatic injuries (n = 12; 5%). Severe liver diseases were exclusion criteria for both case subjects and control subjects.