Coronary artery disease (CAD) and stroke are the major health problems in many countries because of their increasing prevalence and high mortality. It is well known that CAD and stroke are based on atherosclerosis and shared environmental and genetic risk factors. Recently, an association of a functional sequence variation À154G4A in the angiotensin receptor-like 1 (AGTRL1) with a susceptibility to stroke was reported. In this study, we investigated a total of 1479 CAD cases and 2062 controls from the Japanese and Korean populations to validate the association of AGTRL1 with CAD. However, we obtained no evidence of the association in both the Japanese (odds ratio (OR)¼0.95, 95% confidence interval (CI); 0.82-1.10, P¼0.47, allele count model) and Korean (OR¼0.90, 95% CI; 0.77-1.05, P¼0.18, allele count model) populations. In addition, there was no trend of association between the risk allele and severity of coronary atherosclerosis. These data suggested that AGTRL1 did not contribute much to the atherosclerosis of the coronary artery. Keywords: coronary artery disease; AGTRL1; single nucleotide polymorphism; case-control study
INTRODUCTIONCoronary artery disease (CAD) is caused by the thrombotic occlusion of coronary arteries and becomes a major health problem in many countries. CAD is mainly based on the atherosclerosis of the coronary artery and often manifests with sudden chest pain because of reversible (angina pectoris, AP) or irreversible (myocardial infarction, MI) ischemia in the heart caused by the decreased blood flow in the coronary arteries.Stroke, in particular, ischemic stroke is caused by the thrombotic occlusion of cerebral arteries associated with atherosclerosis, which shares at least in part pathogenic mechanisms and risk factors such as smoking, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia and diabetes mellitus with CAD, 1 and recent genome-wide association studies have identified polymorphism on chromosome 9p21 as a common risk variant for both stroke and CAD. [2][3][4] In addition, Hata et al. 5 recently reported that angiotensin receptor-like 1 (AGTRL1) was highly expressed in the cardiovascular system and the central nervous system and that a functional sequence variation À154G4A (rs9943582) in the 5¢-anking region of AGTRL1 was associated with the stroke in Japanese; the G allele frequencies were 0.721 and 0.666 in patients and controls, respectively (OR¼1.30, 95% CI; 1.14-1.47, P¼6.6Â10 À5 ).