Genetic Variations in the Serotoninergic System Contribute to Body-mass Index in Chinese Adolescents

Overview

Journal PLoS One

Specialties General Medicine
Science

Date 2013 Apr 5

PMID 23554917

Citations 8

Authors

Chunhui Chen

Wen Chen

Chuansheng Chen

Robert Moyzis

Qinghua He

Xuemei Lei

Jin Li

Yunxin Wang

Bin Liu

Daiming Xiu

Bi Zhu

Qi Dong

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Objective: Obesity has become a worldwide health problem in the past decades. Human and animal studies have implicated serotonin in appetite regulation, and behavior genetic studies have shown that body mass index (BMI) has a strong genetic component. However, the roles of genes related to the serotoninergic (5-hydroxytryptamine,5-HT) system in obesity/BMI are not well understood, especially in Chinese subjects.

Subjects And Design: With a sample of 478 healthy Chinese volunteers, this study investigated the relation between BMI and genetic variations of the serotoninergic system as characterized by 136 representative polymorphisms. We used a system-level approach to identify SNPs associated with BMI, then estimated their overall contribution to BMI by multiple regression and verified it by permutation.

Results: We identified 12 SNPs that made statistically significant contributions to BMI. After controlling for gender and age, four of these SNPs accounted for 7.7% additional variance of BMI. Permutation analysis showed that the probability of obtaining these findings by chance was low (p = 0.015, permuted for 1000 times).

Conclusion: These results showed that genetic variations in the serotoninergic system made a moderate contribution to individual differences in BMI among a healthy Chinese sample, suggesting that a similar approach can be used to study obesity.

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