The Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC) has been established to conduct combined case-control analyses with augmented statistical power to try to confirm putative genetic associations with breast cancer. We genotyped nine SNPs for which there was some prior evidence of an association with breast cancer: CASP8 D302H (rs1045485), IGFBP3 −202 C → A (rs2854744), SOD2 V16A (rs1799725), TGFB1 L10P (rs1982073), ATM S49C (rs1800054), ADH1B 3′ UTR A → G (rs1042026), CDKN1A S31R (rs1801270), ICAM5 V301I (rs1056538) and NUMA1 A794G (rs3750913). We included data from 9–15 studies, comprising 11,391–18,290 cases and 14,753–22,670 controls. We found evidence of an association with breast cancer for CASP8 D302H (with odds ratios (OR) of 0.89 (95% confidence interval (c.i.): 0.85–0.94) and 0.74 (95% c.i.: 0.62–0.87) for heterozygotes and rare homozygotes, respectively, compared with common homozygotes; P_trend = 1.1 × 10⁻⁷) and weaker evidence for TGFB1 L10P (OR = 1.07 (95% c.i.: 1.02–1.13) and 1.16 (95% c.i.: 1.08–1.25), respectively; P_trend = 2.8 × 10⁻⁵). These results demonstrate that common breast cancer susceptibility alleles with small effects on risk can be identified, given sufficiently powerful studies.

NOTE: In the version of this article initially published, there was an error that affected the calculations of the odds ratios, confidence intervals, between-study heterogeneity, trend test and test for association for SNP ICAM5 V301I in Table 1 (ICAM5 V301I); genotype counts in Supplementary Table 2 (ICAM5; ICR_FBCS and Kuopio studies) and minor allele frequencies, trend test and odds ratios for heterozygotes and rare homozygotes in Supplementary Table 3 (ICAM5; ICR_FBCS and Kuopio studies). The errors in Table 1 have been corrected in the PDF version of the article. The errors in supplementary information have been corrected online.