Published online Jun 14, 2017. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v23.i22.3978
Peer-review started: December 29, 2016
First decision: January 19, 2017
Revised: February 1, 2017
Accepted: June 1, 2017
Article in press: June 1, 2017
Published online: June 14, 2017
Processing time: 172 Days and 5.2 Hours
Gallbladder cancer is a malignancy of biliary tract which is infrequent in developed countries but common in some specific geographical regions of developing countries. Late diagnosis and deprived prognosis are major problems for treatment of gallbladder carcinoma. The dramatic associations of this orphan cancer with various genetic and environmental factors are responsible for its poorly defined pathogenesis. An understanding to the relationship between epidemiology, molecular genetics and pathogenesis of gallbladder cancer can add new insights to its undetermined pathophysiology. Present review article provides a recent update regarding epidemiology, pathogenesis, and molecular genetics of gallbladder cancer. We systematically reviewed published literature on gallbladder cancer from online search engine PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed). Various keywords used for retrieval of articles were Gallbladder, cancer Epidemiology, molecular genetics and bullion operators like AND, OR, NOT. Cross references were manually searched from various online search engines (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed,https://scholar.google.co.in/, http://www.medline.com/home.jsp). Most of the articles published from 1982 to 2015 in peer reviewed journals have been included in this review.
Core tip: The Gallbladder cancer is a fatal malignancy which displays considerable differences in certain ethnicities and geographic regions. Indo-Gangetic plains of India, Mapuche Indians in Chile and South America are most affected regions with this cancer. Because of this cancer is largely unstudied as compare to other cancers Present review provides a comprehensive summery of the studies conducted regarding its Epidemiology, Pathogenesis and molecular genetics. This will be helpful for the researchers to understand the current scenario of research work and how much success we have gained till now. Based on which future research work can be planned in appropriate directions.