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Single-nucleotide polymorphisms in TrkB and risk for depression: findings from the women's interagency HIV study
Valeriya Avdoshina1, Italo Mocchetti, Chenglong Liu
1Departments of *Neuroscience and †Medicine, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC; ‡Departments of Medicine and Epidemiology & Population Health, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, NY; §Departments of Medicine, Stroger Hospital and Rush University, Chicago, IL; ‖Departments of Neurology and Pathology, SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY; ¶Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA; #Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD; Departments of **Neurology; ††Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, and Biomathematics; ‡‡Psychiatry, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC; and §§Collaborative for Research on Outcomes and Metrics, Department of Neurology, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC.
Abstract:
Individuals infected with HIV type 1 are more likely than noninfected individuals to develop depression. HIV lowers brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a neurotrophic factor whose receptors play a crucial role in the pathophysiology of depression. Therefore, we examined whether a single-nucleotide polymorphism in the BDNF gene (rs56164415) and related receptors TrkB (rs1212171) and p75 (rs2072446) were associated with depression in HIV-infected individuals. A total of 1365 HIV-positive and 371 HIV-negative female subjects were included. The distribution of alleles was analyzed independently in African Americans (non-Hispanic) and Caucasians (non-Hispanic). We have found that the absence of depressive symptoms in HIV-positive subjects is associated with a genetic variation of the TrkB but not with BDNF or p75 genes. This mutation explains 0.8% and 4.4% of the variability for the absence of depression in African Americans and Caucasians, respectively.
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