• Takefumi Nojiri, Hiroyuki Morita, Yasushi Imai, Koji Maemura, Minoru Ohno, Ken Ogasawara, Tadanori Aizawa, Akira Saito, Doubun Hayashi, Yasunobu Hirata, Takao Sugiyama, Tsutomu Yamazaki, and Ryozo Nagai.
• Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8655, Japan.
• Int. J. Cardiol. 2003 Dec 1; 92 (2-3): 181-6.

AbstractMatrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are involved in plaque rupture, which is the main pathological cause of myocardial infarction (MI). Recently, several genetic studies have demonstrated that MMP-1 1G/2G polymorphism and MMP-3 5A/6A polymorphism modify each transcriptional activity in allele specific manners. Within this context, we conducted case-control studies to examine whether these genetic polymorphisms are associated with susceptibility to MI. Two groups comprising patients with MI (group-1 164 patients, group-2 302 patients) were compared with control group comprising 335 patients without cardiovascular diseases. The MMP-3 5A allele was more frequent in patients with MI than in the control subjects (P=0.018 MI group-1, P=0.0059 MI group-2), whereas there was no disease association for MMP-1 genotypes. Logistic regression analyses revealed that MMP-3 5A/6A polymorphism was associated with susceptibility to MI [odds ratio(OR) (95% confidential interval) 1.67 (1.02-2.74); P=0.042, MI group-1; 1.61 (1.12-2.23); P=0.0095, MI group-2]. Other important findings were that there was strong linkage disequilibrium between these polymorphisms, which are located closely on chromosome 11q.22, and that the 5A-1G haplotype was a genetic risk factor for MI (OR 1.97 P=0.0082, MI group-1 OR 1.51 P=0.017, MI group-2). Taken together, the present findings suggest that genetic variations in these MMP genes and especially their haplotype may be useful genetic markers for determining susceptibility to MI in Japanese.

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