ASSOCIATION OF TREM-1 GENE POLYMORPHISMS WITH INFECTIVE ENDOCARDITIS

Abstract

Infective endocarditis (IE) is a septic inflammation of endocardium, which generally involves the lining of the heart chambers and heart valves. The development of IE depends in many respects on how properly and efficiently the immune system responds to the occurrence of an infection. Innate immunity, which carries out the response to a transient bacteremia, is genetically determined in a large extent. Pattern recognition receptors, which identify pathogenand danger-associated molecular patterns, are the main effectors of innate immune response; one of these receptors is triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells-1 (TREM-1). We hypothesized that inherited variation in TREM-1 gene may affect individual susceptibility to IE. The distribution of genotypes and alleles of rs1817537, rs3804277, rs6910730, rs7768162, rs2234246, rs4711668, rs9471535, and rs2234237 gene polymorphisms was investigated in 110 Caucasian (Russian) subjects with IE and 300 age-, sex-, and ethnicity-matched healthy blood donors. Odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals were calculated. We found that rs1817537 polymorphism was associated with decreased IE risk (OR = 0.60; 95%CI = 0.37–0.99; р = 0.046, dominant model); however, this was not significant after an adjustment for multiple comparisons. Therefore, we observed no statistically significant association between the investigated polymorphisms within TREM-1 gene and IE. Further in-depth investigations in this field are necessary to shed the light on the impact of inherited variation within innate immune response genes on the development of IE.

Keywords

• infective endocarditis
• gene polymorphisms
• innate immunity
• trem-1
• inflammatory response
• infectious immunity