TERT and esophageal cancer: Earlier studies have reported that the rs2242652 TERT genetic polymorphisms were associated with increased risk of non-hematological malignancies including: melanoma (Nan et al. 2011), estrogen receptor negative breast cancer (Bojesen et al., 2013), prostatic carcinoma (Hazelett et al., 2014), glioma (Mosrati et al., 2015a), lung cancer (Ye et al., 2017), esophageal cancer (Wu et al., 2017b), urothelial carcinoma (Roggisch et al., 2020), and thyroid carcinoma (Yang et al., 2019b).