Lack of association between a functional variant of the BRCA-1 related associated protein (BRAP) gene and ischemic stroke.

Background: Atherosclerosis shares common pathogenic features with myocardial infarction (MI) and ischemic stroke. BRCA-1 associated protein (BRAP), a newly identified risk gene for MI, aggravates the inflammatory response in atherosclerosis. The aim of this study was to test the association between the BRAP gene and stroke in a Taiwanese population.

Methods: A total of 1,074 stroke patients and 1,936 controls were genotyped for the functional SNP rs11066001. In our previous studies, the rare allele of this SNP has been repeatedly shown to exert a recessive effect. Therefore, in the current study, we tested for the same recessive model. First, the genotype distributions between all the controls and all the stroke cases were compared. Then to reduce heterogeneity, we explored several population subsets by selecting young stroke subjects (using 45 years of age as the cutoff point), age- and sex-comparable controls, plaque-free controls, and stroke subtypes.

Results: We did not find any significant association for the entire data set (OR = 0.94, p = 0.74) or for the subset analyses using age- and sex-comparable controls (p = 0.70) and plaque-free controls (p = 0.91). Analyses of the four stroke subtypes also failed to show any significant associations (p = 0.42 - 0.98). For both young and old subjects, the GG genotype of rs11066001 was similar in the stroke cases and unmatched controls (8.1% vs. 9.4% in young subjects and 8.0% vs. 7.8% in old subjects). Comparing stroke cases with plaque-free controls also failed to find any significant association.

Conclusions: The BRAP polymorphism may not play an important role in ischemic stroke in the studied population.