Vascular endothelial growth factor gene polymorphisms and hypertensive disorder of pregnancy: A meta-analysis

Whether vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) polymorphisms affect individual susceptibility to hypertensive disorder of pregnancy remain controversial. Therefore, we performed this meta-analysis to better evaluate associations between VEGF polymorphisms and hypertensive disorder of pregnancy in a larger pooled population.

Pubmed, Web of Science, Embase and CNKI were searched for eligible studies. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated.

Totally 24 studies were eligible for analyses. In overall analyses, a significant association with hypertensive disorder of pregnancy was observed for rs3025039 polymorphism in dominant (p = 0.01, OR = 0.66, 95%CI 0.48-0.91), recessive (p = 0.002, OR = 1.79, 95%CI 1.25-2.58), overdominant (p = 0.04, OR = 1.35, 95%CI 1.01-1.80) and allele (p = 0.01, OR = 0.72, 95%CI 0.56-0.93) comparisons. But we did not observe any significant associations with hypertensive disorder of pregnancy for other VEGF polymorphisms in overall analyses. Further subgroup analyses by ethnicity showed that rs2010963 polymorphism was significantly associated with hypertensive disorder of pregnancy in Caucasians (dominant and recessive models) and Africans (allele model), whereas rs3025039 polymorphism was significantly associated with hypertensive disorder of pregnancy in Asians (recessive model).

In summary, our findings indicated that rs2010963 and rs3025039 polymorphisms were both significantly associated with the susceptibility to hypertensive disorder of pregnancy in certain populations.