Association of Blood Pressure and Obesity with a Single Nucleotide Polymorphism at 17p12

Abstract

Hypertension is related to overweight and the metabolic syndrome. We have previously studied the microsatellite marker D17S1303 at a quantitative trait locus for abdominal obesity-metabolic syndrome (AOMS1) at 17p12 on chromosome 17, which has also been linked to hypertension in a genome scan in Chinese. We found that it was associated with blood pressure and body mass index. Therefore, we studied 5 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) within 3kb from D17S1303 in 88 hypertensive subjects (49 men, 39 women, age 53±13) and 90 normotensive controls (47 men, 43 women, age 54±13) using the Sequenom genotyping platform. Allelic frequencies in these Chinese subjects differed from those reported for Caucasians. Three SNPs (rs11656507, rs1357926, rs852321) were homozygous in our subjects. The allelic frequencies of rs852321 and rs852320 did not differ between hypertensive and normotensive subjects (p=0.6 and p=0.2 respectively). However, rs852320 genotypes correlated with diastolic blood pressure (r=0.19, p =0.01), percentage body fat (r=0.17, p=0.04) and LDL-cholesterol (r=0.17, p=0.03). The diastolic blood pressures in subjects with the TT, TG and GG genotypes were 78.2±1.1, 81.8±1.9, and 93.2±4.9 mmHgH respectively (p=0.007). Our results provide further evidence that there is a gene, as yet unidentified, predisposing to hypertension and the metabolic syndrome at 17p12.