Abstract
The immune system plays an important role in the control of cancer development. To investigate the possible association of inflammasome genes to childhood leukemia we performed a case-control study with 158 patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and 192 healthy individuals. The IL1B and IL18 genetic polymorphisms were genotyped by Polymerase Chain Reaction-Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) and NLRP1, NLRP3 and P2RX7 were genotyped using Real Time quantitative PCR (qPCR). The IL1B C/T rs19644 genotype was associated with the risk of developing ALL (C/C vs. C/T + T/T OR: 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26-4.88, p = 0.006]; C/C vs C/T OR: 2.74 [95% CI: 1.37-5.51, p = 0.003]) and the NLRP1 A/T rs12150220 (OR: 0.37 [95% CI: 0.16-0.87, p = 0.023]) was associated with protection against infectious comorbidities. It was not found association between NLRP3 and P2RX7 polymorphisms and acute lymphoblastic leukemia in our study. Our results suggest that the inflammasome single-variant polymorphisms (SNVs) may play a role in the development and prognostic of childhood leukemia. However, this finds requires further study within a larger population in order to prove it.