Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the frequency of homozygous deletion of GSTM1 and GSTT1 genes and their combinations between patients with breast cancer and healthy individuals, associating them with disease susceptibility.
Methods: This is a case-control study in which 49 women diagnosed with breast cancer confirmed by pathological examination and 49 healthy women with no evidence of cancer and no prior family history of breast cancer were invited to participate. All of them answered a questionnaire with epidemiological data and were submitted to blood sample collection. Genomic DNA was extracted from blood, and genotyping was performed by polymerase chain reaction. Data were analyzed with SPSS 20.0.
Results: The frequency of null alleles for GSTM1 and GSTT1 was 58.8 and 61.7%, respectively, for patients with breast cancer, and 41.2 and 38.3%, respectively, in control patients. In homozygous deletion of the GSTM1 gene, a significantly higher frequency was found in the breast cancer cases.
Conclusion: Breast cancer patients presented higher frequency of homozygous deletion of the GSTM1 gene compared with the control group.