Recently, a single-nucleotide polymorphism in the MDM2 promoter (SNP309) has been found to lower the age of onset of tumors and increase the occurrence of multiple primary tumors in Li-Fraumeni syndrome, and accelerate the development of sporadic adult soft tissue sarcoma.
Furthermore, SNP309 was proposed to be associated with accelerated soft tissue sarcoma formation in both hereditary (Li-Fraumeni) and sporadic cases in humans.
Surprisingly, MDM2 amplification in soft tissue sarcoma patients was associated with a prognosis better than that of patients without the amplification; however, this difference was not statistically significant (P =.6).
In this study, 65 soft tissue sarcoma (STS) samples were analyzed for mdm2 mRNA expression by a quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) approach using available validated ready-to-use assays based on the TaqMan technology (PE Applied Biosystems, Weiterstadt, Germany).