MCP-1 -2518 A/G gene polymorphism is associated with blood pressure in ischemic heart disease asymptomatic subjects

Monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), one of the key inflammatory chemokines, plays an important role in the initiation of atherosclerosis, and represents a risk for coronary artery disease and myocardial infarction. A recent animal study showed that MCP-1 gene might be a candidate gene for salt-sensitive hypertension in Dahl salt sensitive rats. This effect has not been yet studied in asymptomatic humans. We tested the MCP-1 -2518 A/G single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in 66 hypertensive ischemic heart disease asymptomatic subjects. Inflammatory markers, classic risk factors and absolute cardiovascular risk (SCORE system) were also investigated in these subjects. Our results showed that both, systolic and diastolic values of blood pressure were associated with MCP-1 -2518 A/G SNP at the level of both, genotype and allele frequencies. Subjects with mutant G allele had higher levels of both values of blood pressure, systolic (p = 0.035) and diastolic (p = 0.040) than subjects with allele A. Statistically significantly higher levels of both values of blood pressure, systolic (p = 0.037) and diastolic (p = 0.021) were found also in IHD asymptomatic subjects with AG and GG genotypes. Subjects with AG and GG genotypes had also an increased absolute cardiovascular risk (1.62% vs 3.17%; p = 0.004) and an increasing trend for elevated plasma level of high-sensitive CRP (2.858 vs 2.062 mg/l; p = 0.076). We did not find any significant correlation between the serum level of MCP-1 and blood pressure. To our best knowledge, this is the first study concerning the association between MCP-1 polymorphism and arterial blood pressure in IHD asymptomatic subjects. These results indicate that the expression of MCP-1 may be increased before the onset of hypertension but further observations from larger cohorts are needed to confirm this finding (Tab. 6, Ref. 41).