Meta-analysis of association between the genetic polymorphisms on chromosome 11q and Alzheimer's disease susceptibility

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease mostly occurred in the elderly. Genetic mutation is one of well-established risk factors for AD. Several polymorphisms on chromosome 11q were reported to be associated with AD susceptibility. Hence we performed a meta-analysis to systematically assess the association between the most-reported polymorphisms on chromosome 11q (rs10793294, rs7115850, rs7101429, rs4945261, rs2373115, rs670142, rs610932, rs541458 and rs3851179) and AD risk. A comprehensive literature search in the electronic databases was performed to identify all eligible studies. The pooled odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were calculated to evaluate the association between 11q variants and AD risk by using the allelic model. Sensitivity analysis was carried out to analyze the influence of single study on the overall results. Begg's funnel plots and Egger's test were used to assess the publication biases among studies. All the statistical analyses were conducted by using STATA 12.0 Software (Stata Corp, College Station, TX, USA). A total of 35 eligible articles were included in our meta-analysis. Our data showed that the polymorphism of rs610932 were significantly associated with lower AD risk with a pooled OR of 0.88 (95% CI: 0.84-0.92, P = 0.005). The other SNPs of rs494526 (OR = 0.83, 95% CI: 0.65-1.00, P < 0.001), rs2373115 (OR = 0.85, 95% CI: 0.75-0.95, P < 0.001) and rs670139 (OR = 1.09, 95% CI: 1.05-1.12, P = 0.554) were shown to be correlated with lower AD risk. Subgroup analysis revealed a similar result in Caucasians. But only the rs610932 polymorphism was found to be associated with lower AD risk in Asians. The polymorphism of rs610932 was shown to be a risk factor for AD while the other three genetic variants (rs494526, rs2373115 and rs610932) may act as protective factors against AD.