PLoS ONE (Jan 2014)

Whole blood gene expression and atrial fibrillation: the Framingham Heart Study.

  • Honghuang Lin,
  • Xiaoyan Yin,
  • Kathryn L Lunetta,
  • Josée Dupuis,
  • David D McManus,
  • Steven A Lubitz,
  • Jared W Magnani,
  • Roby Joehanes,
  • Peter J Munson,
  • Martin G Larson,
  • Daniel Levy,
  • Patrick T Ellinor,
  • Emelia J Benjamin

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0096794
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9, no. 5
p. e96794

Abstract

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Atrial fibrillation (AF) involves substantial electrophysiological, structural and contractile remodeling. We hypothesize that characterizing gene expression might uncover important pathways related to AF.We performed genome-wide whole blood transcriptomic profiling (Affymetrix Human Exon 1.0 ST Array) of 2446 participants (mean age 66 ± 9 years, 55% women) from the Offspring cohort of Framingham Heart Study. The study included 177 participants with prevalent AF, 143 with incident AF during up to 7 years follow up, and 2126 participants with no AF. We identified seven genes statistically significantly up-regulated with prevalent AF. The most significant gene, PBX1 (P = 2.8 × 10(-7)), plays an important role in cardiovascular development. We integrated differential gene expression with gene-gene interaction information to identify several signaling pathways possibly involved in AF-related transcriptional regulation. We did not detect any statistically significant transcriptomic associations with incident AF.We examined associations of gene expression with AF in a large community-based cohort. Our study revealed several genes and signaling pathways that are potentially involved in AF-related transcriptional regulation.