Physiological Study on Association between Nicotinamide N-Methyltransferase Gene Polymorphisms and Hyperlipidemia

Nicotinamide N-methyltransferase (NNMT) catalyzes the methylation of nicotinamide. Our previous works indicate that NNMT is involved in the body mass index and energy metabolism, and recently the association between a SNP (rs694539) of NNMT and a variety of cardiovascular diseases was reported. At present, more than 200 NNMT single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been identified in the databases of the human genome projects; however, the association between rs694539 variation and hyperlipidemia has not been reported yet, and whether there are any SNPs in NNMT significantly associated with hyperlipidemia is still unclear. In this paper, we selected 19 SNPs in NNMT as the tagSNPs using Haploview software (Haploview 4.2) first and then performed a case-control study to observe the association between these tagSNPs and hyperlipidemia and finally applied physiological approaches to explore the possible mechanisms through which the NNMT polymorphism induces hyperlipidemia. The results show that a SNP (rs1941404) in NNMT is significantly associated with hyperlipidemia, and the influence of rs1941404 variation on the resting energy expenditure may be the possible mechanism for rs1941404 variation to induce hyperlipidemia.