An association study between SCFD1 rs10139154 variant and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in a Chinese cohort

Background: A recent genome-wide association study (GWAS) demonstrated that the Sec1 family domain containing 1 (SCFD1) gene is associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The objective of our study was to investigate the association between the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs10139154 in the SCFD1 gene and ALS in a Chinese cohort.Methods: A cohort of 1074 sporadic ALS (SALS) patients from the Department of Neurology at the West China Hospital of Sichuan University were genotyped for rs10139154 using a polymerase chain reaction restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) analysis. In addition, 927 unrelated healthy controls (HCs) from the same region were included.Results: After adjusting for age and sex, no significant differences in the genotype distributions and allele frequencies in the allelic, additive, dominant or recessive genetic models were found between SALS and HCs and between patients with spinal onset and bulbar onset. Remarkably, rs10139154 was shown to be associated with the age at onset (AAO) of ALS patients. Consistently, ALS patients with the "CC" genotype have an earlier mean AAO than that of patients with a "CG" and "CG + GG" genotype (p = 0.002 and 0.001, respectively).Conclusion: Our results suggest that there is a lack of association of SCFD1 rs10139154 with the risk for ALS in a large Chinese population, but this variant may modulate the age of onset of ALS. These findings add further evidence to the suspected implication of the SCFD1 gene in the pathogenesis of disease in our ALS population.