A family-based association study of T1945C polymorphism in the proline dehydrogenase gene and schizophrenia in the Chinese population

Previous studies have reported genetic linkage evidence for a candidate gene of schizophrenia on chromosome 22q11 but no genes in this region have been really confirmed to be involved in the etiology of schizophrenia so far. Very recently, the proline dehydrogenase gene (PRODH), located in the most centromeric part of the 22q11 microdeletion region, has been reported to be strongly associated with schizophrenia from three sets of independent samples and the most significant evidence for association was derived from a single nucleotide polymorphism-PRODH*1945(T/C). We genotyped this polymorphism in 166 Chinese family trios with schizophrenia from East China. No evidence for preferential transmission of the PRODH*1945 alleles from parents to affected offsprings was found using either Transmission Disequilibrium Test (P = 0.4) or Haplotype-based Haplotype Relative Risk analysis (P = 0.35). Our results suggest that the 1945(TIC) polymorphism of the proline dehydrogenase gene is unlikely to play a major role in the susceptibility to schizophrenia in the Chinese population. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.