In the context of lung cancer, genetic variants at several loci have been associated with both LTL and lung cancer risk, including variants near the TERT, TERC, OBFC1, and RTEL1 genes, fundamental to telomere length maintenance (McKay et al., 2008; Wang et al., 2008; Rafnar et al., 2009; Kachuri et al., 2016; McKay et al., 2017). Here, TERC is linked to lung cancer.