Association of Leucocyte Telomere Length with Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Risk and Prognosis

The Objectives: Cancer development and/or progression can be imputed to telomere shortening or lengthening. The cur-rent research was planned to assess the relation between leucocyte telomere length (LTL) and nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) development, and to evaluate the association between this biomarker and patients' clinical outcomes, mainly response to chemo-radiotherapy, survival and EBV-DNA load. Methods: Leucocyte telomere length was measured using a singleplex quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) method in 104 NPC patients and 52 healthy controls. The association between LTL and NPC development was assessed using a Khi-deux test. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated by conditional logistic regression to evaluate the relationship LTL and patient’s characteristics. The correlation between LTL and 4-years patient’s survival outcomes was assessed by Kaplan–Meier and Cox-regression analyses. Results: Data analysis revealed a significant association between LTL and risk of NPC development (p<0.0001). LTL was also significantly associated with gender (p=0.003), cigarette smoking (p=0.02) and pre-EBV-DNA load (p=0.017) in NPC. However, no significant association was obtained between LTL and age, alcohol consumption, TNM classification, disease stage, response to chemo-radiotherapy and survival outcomes of NPC patients (p>0.05). Conclusion: The study finding highlighted the close association between LTL and NPC development and showed a significant association with gender, cigarette smoking and pre-EBV-DNA load, suggesting that LTL could be a promising biomarker for better management of NPC in Morocco. Nevertheless, more studies are needed to highlight the value of LTL as a biomarker for the prediction of the response to treatment and prognosis of NPC.