Compared to previous pan-cancer studies, although not in HB patients, the findings of germline variants in APC, CHEK2, ERCC5, MSH2, MUTYH, and VHL were also detected in our work (Zhang et al., 2015; Ma et al., 2018a; Grobner et al., 2018; Newman et al., 2021). This evidence concerns the gene ERCC5 and hemoglobin measurement.