Genome-wide association study reveals HSF2, GJA1 and TRIM36 as susceptibility genes for preeclampsia: a community-based population study in Tianjin, China

Abstract

Background Preeclampsia (PE) mainly occurs in pregnant women and is hereditary. Several genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on Caucasian samples have reported some gene loci that are associated with preeclampsia. However, these studies have not reached consistent conclusions. No previous GWAS has examined preeclampsia in the Chinese Han population. Method This study aimed to identify common genetic variations associated with preeclampsia in the Chinese Han population through two-stage case‒control studies. The discovery cohort included 92 patients with severe preeclampsia and 187 healthy controls. The validation cohort included 52 patients with preeclampsia and 104 controls. A genome-wide association study was performed to identify putative preeclampsia genes in the discovery cohort, with validation in the validation cohort. Results In the discovery cohort, GWAS demonstrated that 19 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were associated with preeclampsia (P 0.05). Furthermore, rs13210237 and rs13176432 were related to preeclampsia in the adjusted regression model (P < 0.000). Conclusion In this study of two independent cohorts, we found that rs13210237 and rs13176432 might be novel preeclampsia-susceptible genetic factors in the Han population in China. However, there was no association between the onset of preeclampsia and these genotypes.

Keywords

• genome-wide association study (gwas)
• single-nucleotide polymorphisms (snps)
• preeclampsia (pe)