De Novo FGF12 (Fibroblast Growth Factor 12) Functional Variation Is Potentially Associated With Idiopathic Ventricular Tachycardia

Abstract

Background: Idiopathic ventricular tachycardia (VT) is a type of cardiac arrhythmia occurring in structurally normal hearts. The heritability of idiopathic VT remains to be clarified, and numerous genetic factors responsible for development of idiopathic VT are as yet unclear. Variations in FGF12 (fibroblast growth factor 12), which is expressed in the human ventricle and modulates the cardiac Na⁺ channel Na_V1.5, may play an important role in the genetic pathogenesis of VT.

Methods and results: We tested the hypothesis that genetic variations in FGF12 are associated with VT in 2 independent Chinese cohorts and resequenced all the exons and exon-intron boundaries and the 5' and 3' untranslated regions of FGF12 in 320 unrelated participants with idiopathic VT. For population-based case-control association studies, we chose 3 single-nucleotide polymorphisms-rs1460922, rs4687326, and rs2686464-which included all the exons of FGF12. The results showed that the single-nucleotide polymorphism rs1460922 in FGF12 was significantly associated with VT after adjusting for covariates of sex and age in 2 independent Chinese populations: adjusted P=0.015 (odds ratio: 1.54 [95% CI, 1.09-2.19]) in the discovery sample, adjusted P=0.018 (odds ratio: 1.64 [95% CI, 1.09-2.48]) in the replication sample, and adjusted P=2.52E-04 (odds ratio: 1.59 [95% CI, 1.24-2.03]) in the combined sample. After resequencing all amino acid coding regions and untranslated regions of FGF12, 5 rare variations were identified. The result of western blotting revealed that a de novo functional variation, p.P211Q (1.84% of 163 patients with right ventricular outflow tract VT), could downregulate FGF12 expression significantly.

Conclusions: In this study, we observed that rs1460922 of FGF12 was significantly associated with VT and identified that a de novo variation of FGF12 may be an important genetic risk factor for the pathogenesis of VT.

Keywords: fibroblast growth factor 12; genetic risk factor; variations; ventricular tachycardia.