Background: The pathological basis of coronary heart disease (CHD) is atherosclerosis. BTNL2 can inhibit the activation of T cells. We aimed to explore the association between BTNL2 genetic variants and CHD risk in the southern Chinese Han population.
Methods: We recruited 1419 participants to perform an association analysis between missense variants in BTNL2 and CHD risk through SNPStats online software. Genotyping of all candidate SNPs were completed by the Agena MassARRAY. In addition, we used false-positive report probability analysis to detect whether the positive findings were noteworthy observations. We also used Haploview 4.2 software and SNPStats online software to conduct the haplotype analysis and analysis of linkage disequilibrium (LD). Finally, the interaction of SNP-SNP in CHD risk was evaluated by multi-factor dimensionality reduction (MDR).
Results: The results showed that BTNL2 -rs35624343, -rs117896888, -rs41441651, -rs41417449, -rs28362680 and -rs2076523 were significantly associated with the CHD susceptibility. Especially for BTNL2 -rs28362680, the allele A (OR = 0.68, p < 0.0001), genotype AA (OR = 0.40, p = 0.001) or GA (OR = 0.68, p < 0.0001) were associated with the reducing CHD risk. And -rs28362680 significantly reduced the CHD risk under all genetic models (dominant: OR = 0.64, p < 0.0001; recessive: OR = 0.47, p = 0.003; overdominant: OR = 0.73, p = 0.004; log-additive: OR = 0.66, p < 0.0001). And -rs28362680 was also closely associated with CHD risk reduction in all stratified analyses (age, gender, smoking, drinking, hypertension and diabetes). In addition, haplotype analysis showed that the “C_rs117896888C_rs41441651T_rs41417449A_rs28362680” (OR = 0.65, p < 0.0001) and “G_rs117896888T_rs41441651C_rs41417449A_rs28362680” (OR = 0.68, p = 0.013) may reduce CHD risk.
Conclusion: Missense variants (rs35624343, rs117896888, rs41441651, rs41417449, rs28362680, rs2076523) may be protective factors for the CHD risk. In particular, there were sufficient evidences that BTNL2-rs28362680 can protective CHD risk.
Keywords: coronary heart disease, BTNL2 , missense variants, southern Chinese Han population