Dysgeusia is a major side effect of anti-cancer drug treatment. Since dysgeusia significantly lowers the patient's quality of life, predicting and avoiding its onset in advance is desirable. Accordingly, aims of the present study were to use a genome-wide association study (GWAS) to identify genes associated with the development of dysgeusia in patients taking anti-cancer drugs and to predict the development of dysgeusia using associated SNPs. GWAS was conducted on 76 patients admitted to the Department of Hematology, Tokushima University Hospital. Using Sanger sequencing for 23 separately collected validation samples, the top two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with the development of dysgeusia were determined.GWAS identified rs73049478 and rs41396146 SNPs on the RARB gene associated with dysgeusia development due to the administration of anti-cancer drugs. Evaluation of the two SNPs using 23 validation samples indicated that the accuracy rate of rs73049478 was relatively high (87.0%). Thus, the findings of the present study suggest that the rs73049478 SNP of RARB can be used to predict the onset of dysgeusia caused by the administration of anti-cancer drugs.