Retrospective study of association of leukocyte telomere length variants with survival outcomes in stage II or III colorectal cancer

The Biobank for Gastrointestinal Health Research (BGHR) is an ongoing project involving collection of biospecimens at the Mayo Clinic. A cohort study using BGHR data investigated the association of leukocyte telomere length (LTL) and survival outcomes of 1007 patients with stage II or III colorectal cancer (CRC) between 2000 and 2017. Blood samples were collected prior to chemotherapy/radiation, and DNA was extracted for measuring median LTL. After correction for age and sex, median LTL was significantly and independently associated with both disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS). The rs1317982 SNP in the TERC gene was significantly associated with both DFS (p=0.023) and OS (p=0.017) for the combined stage II and stage III patients, whereas for these patients a significant association of the OBFC1 SNP rs9419958 with OS was observed. The authors conclude that these results show that LTL is predictive of DFS and OS for stage II and III CRC patients, whereas certain SNPs in genes involved in telomere maintenance are significantly associated with patient outcomes.