Apolipoprotein E gene polymorphism frequencies in a sample of healthy Hungarians

Apolipoprotein E (apo E) has been found to play an important role in lipid metabolism and has been associated with cardiovascular and neurodegenerative conditions. Hungarians have some of the highest rates of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in the world. This study examines the distribution of apo E alleles and genotypes in a population of healthy ethnic Hungarian blood donors (n = 302). Male (n = 152) and female (n = 150) subjects ranging from 18 to 62 years of age (mean 37.0) were involved. To determine the frequency of apo E alleles, polymerase chain reaction followed by restriction length polymorphism was applied. The analyses of data showed that apo E allele epsilon3 had the greatest frequency in this group (0.807), followed by apo epsilon2 (0.104) and apo epsilon4 (0.087). The highest genotype frequency was found to be epsilon3/3 at 65.2% (n = 197) followed by genotype epsilon3/4 at 15.9% (n = 48), genotype epsilon2/3 at 15.2% (n = 46), genotype epsilon2/2 at 2.3% (n = 7), genotype epsilon2/4 at 1.0% (n = 3) and genotype epsilon4/4 at 0.4% (n = 1). The apo E frequencies found in this study appear to differ from an earlier study of blood donors, where the results are based on apo E phenotyping.