Impact of single-nucleotide polymorphisms on radiation pneumonitis in cancer patients

Radiation pneumonitis (RP) is one of the most important dose-limiting toxicities in the radiotherapy of thoracic tumors, which reduces the rate of local tumor control and overall survival and severely affects the patients' quality of life. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have recently attracted increasing attention as biomarkers for predicting the development of RP. SNPs in inflammation-related, DNA repair-related, stress response-related and angiogenesis-related genes were proved to be associated with RP, with different underlying mechanisms. Radiogenomics focuses on the differences in radiosensitivity caused by gene sequence variation, which may prove helpful in investigating the abovementioned associations. In this review, we aimed to investigate the associations between RP and SNPs reported in recent studies and highlight the main content and prospects of radiogenomics.