In our study, the prevalence of pathogenic variants in PALB2 was 0.77%, which was higher than 0.66–0.71% observed in most large-scale cohorts of Chinese unselected breast cancer patients (Zhang et al. 2017; Wu et al. 2020; Fu et al. 2021), but lower than 0.97% reported by Zhou et al. (Zhou et al. 2020). Here, PALB2 is linked to breast carcinoma.