Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups and somatic mutations are associated with lung cancer in patients from Southwest China.

Mitochondrial DNA mutations play crucial roles in the pathogenesis and progression of human malignancies. Therefore, to determine whether maternal background or mitochondrial DNA somatic mutations were essential cofactors in the lung cancer of Chinese patients as well, the complete mitochondrial DNA displacement loop of the primary cancerous, matched para-cancerous normal and distant normal tissues for 79 Chinese patients with lung cancer were analyzed in this study. Our results indicated that the higher detected frequency of haplogroups prevalent in southern East Asia (53.16%; 42/79) versus