To date, although a number of studies have been performed to investigate the association between the ERCC5 Asp1104His polymorphism and cancer risk, the evidence regarding the role of SNPs of the ERCC5 gene as a genetic marker for cancer risk is conflicting, partially because of the possible lack of a main effect of the SNP on risk of any single type of cancer, a possibly low penetrance or weak effect, or the relatively small sample size in each of published studies. Here, ERCC5 is linked to cancer.