Abstract
The burden of atherosclerosis is heritable and associated with elevated risk of developing CVDs. Here, we evaluated genetic variants of adiponectin (ADIPOQ) gene, which has important role in anti- atherosclerosis, with risk of atherosclerosis among a large Chinese population. Our results show that rs74577862 was significantly associated with risk of atherosclerosis (OR=2.08; 95%CI=1.48-2.91; P=2.2×10-5). When stratified by atherosclerosis site, rs74577862 was associated with increased risk of both carotid atherosclerosis (OR=2.03; 95%CI=1.35-3.06; P=6.3×10-4) and coronary atherosclerosis (OR=2.11; 95%CI=1.44-3.09; P=1.1×10-4). In addition, we also carried out site-directed mutagenesis and dual-luciferase reporter assay to confirm the positive finding, which presents a significant decrease in luciferase expression for the reconstructed plasmid with rs74577862 A allele in comparison to the one with G allele (P<0.001). Real-time PCR also confirmed the findings above. These results strongly suggest that the functional SNP, ADIPOQ rs74577862 might contribute to atherosclerosis susceptibility.