| Abstract
| - Recently, through a genome wide association study in Japanese knee osteoarthritis (OA) cases, a previously unknown gene, DVWA, was identified. The non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs7639618 was subsequently found to be consistent and most significantly associated in Japanese and Han Chinese knee OA studies and functional relevant. Here, the association of the DVWA polymorphisms (rs7639618, rs11718863 and rs9864422) was genotyped in 1120 knee OA cases, 1482 hip OA cases and 2147 controls, all of white European descent from the Netherlands, the UK, Spain and Greece. Random effect DerSimonian and Laird meta-analyses were performed to assess the association in the different strata. To assess a more global effect, the original Japanese and Chinese data were included with the European. The meta-analyses provided evidence for global association of rs7639618 with knee OA with an odds ratio (OR) of 1.29, 95% confidence interval (CI) of 1.15-1.45 and a P-value of 2.70 × 10−5. This effect, however, showed moderate heterogeneity, and rs7639618 was not independently associated with knee OA in Europeans, with an OR of 1.16, 95% CI of 0.99-1.35 and a P-value of 0.063. Furthermore, no association was observed with hip OA in Europeans, with a P-value of 0.851. Our results suggest that there may be global relevance for the DVWA SNP rs7639618 among knee OA cases, however, the apparent lower effect size in combination with the higher risk allele frequency in the European samples highlights again the ethnic differences in effects of discovered OA susceptibility genes.
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