A Preliminary Study of the Association between Apolipoprotein E Promoter Methylation and Atherosclerotic Cerebral Infarction

To investigate association of Apolipoprotein E (ApoE) gene promoter methylation with atherosclerotic cerebral infarction (ACI) in the Han Chinese population.Twenty-six ACI patients (the case group) and 26 healthy (the control group) were recruited randomly from Henan Han nationality population, from April 2016 to August 2016. Bisulfite pyrosequencing technology was used to examine the role of the aberrant gene promoter methylation in ACI in Han Chinese population. Especially, we used the odds ratio and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) method to elevate the correlation between ApoE Promoter Methylation and ACI.The case group was significantly more likely to have hypertension and carotid atherosclerotic plaques (Table 1). The case group had significantly lower levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), folate, and higher levels of homocysteine (Table 2). We observed that ACI patients (n = 26) had significantly higher methylation levels at cytosine-phosphate-guanine (CpG) 14 and CpG16 compared with controls (n = 26) (Table 3). Importantly, our results indicated a significant association between ApoE promoter methylation and ACI (OR = 16.146; 95% CI, 1.154-225.832; P*.05; P*: adjusted for age, gender, carotid atherosclerotic plaque, hypertension, HDL-C, homocysteine, and folate) (Table 4).Our study indicates that ApoE promoter methylation may be associated with ACI in Han Chinese people.