TYMS and myelodysplastic syndrome: We investigated two common TYMS polymorphisms in 94 MDS and 113 control mothers of Italian origin (Coppedè et al., 2009), namely a 28-bp short tandem repeats (rs34743033) in the 5′-untranslated region (5′-UTR) that is linked to gene expression levels (Horie et al., 1995), and a 6-bp deletion (1494 ins/del) polymorphism in the 3′-UTR (rs34489327) that affects mRNA stability into the cytoplasm (Ulrich et al., 2002).