Association between urotensin II gene polymorphism and pre-eclampsia

Objective

To investigate the association of a specific polymorphism (S89N) in exon 3 of the urotensin II (UTS2) gene in pre-eclampsia.

Study design

One hundred and forty-two subjects, 85 with a diagnosis of pre-eclampsia/eclampsia (group I) and 57 healthy pregnant subjects as a control group (group II), who had been admitted between January 2006 and December 2007, were included. All the subjects were tested for G to A transition in codon 266 in the urotensin II gene by polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP). The distributions of genotypes and allele frequencies were compared between the groups.

Results

Demographics such as age, gestational age, gravidity, abortion and parity were similar in both groups (p > 0.05). No statistically significant differences were observed between the groups concerning genotype distribution and allele frequency (p = 0.305, p = 0.326, respectively). The observed genotype counts did not deviate significantly from those expected according to the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE).

Conclusion

The results of this study suggest that UTS2 single gene (S89N) polymorphism is not associated with pre-eclampsia. Further studies are needed to investigate the prevalence of other single nucleotide gene polymorphisms in pre-eclampsia.