Research article

Lack of association of two common polymorphisms on 9p21 with risk of coronary heart disease and myocardial infarction; results from a prospective cohort study

Abbas Dehghan¹ , Mandy van Hoek² , Eric JG Sijbrands² , Ben A Oostra³ , Albert Hofman¹ , Cornelia M van Duijn¹ and Jacqueline CM Witteman¹

¹Department of Epidemiology, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands

²Department of Internal Medicine, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands

³Department of Clinical Genetics, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands

author email corresponding author email

BMC Medicine 2008, 6:30doi:10.1186/1741-7015-6-30

Published:	16 October 2008

Abstract

Background

Recent genome wide association (GWA) studies identified two Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP) (rs10757278 and rs10757274) in the region of the CDK2NA and CDK2NB genes to be consistently associated with the risks of coronary heart disease (CHD) and myocardial infarction (MI). We examined the SNPs in relation to the risk of CHD and MI in a large population based study of elderly population.

Methods

The Rotterdam Study is a population-based, prospective cohort study among 7983 participants aged 55 years and older. Associations of the polymorphisms with CHD and MI were assessed by use of Cox proportional hazards analyses.

Results

In an additive model, the age and sex adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) (95% confidence interval) for CHD and MI were 1.03 (0.90, 1.18) and 0.94 (0.82, 1.08) per copy of the G allele of rs10757274. The corresponding HRs were 1.03 (0.90, 1.18) and 0.93 (0.81, 1.06) for the G allele of rs10757278. The association of the SNPs with CHD and MI was not significant in any of the subgroups of CHD risk factors.

Conclusion

we were not able to show an association of the studied SNPs with risks of CHD and MI. This may be due to differences in genes involved in the occurrence of CHD in young and older people.