Abstract
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the 5(th) leading cancer in China. Alcohol consumption has been reported to be one of the risk factors of CRC. However, it remains unclear whether genetic variants of alcohol metabolic genes are associated with CRC risk. In this study, we tested the coding variants in the alcohol metabolic genes and the risk of CRC, by using 485 cases and 516 controls. A total of 16 germline coding variants in 10 alcohol metabolic genes were genotyped. We identified that rs3741178 in ALDH3B2 was significantly associated with CRC risk with odds ratio being 2.13 (95% CI: 1.24-3.68, P=0.0064). Further functional annotation suggested that this variant may damage the protein function of ALDH3B2. Our results suggested that ALDH3B2 in the alcohol metabolism pathway contributed to the development of CRC, which may contribute to the prevention of this disease in the future.