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Association of common and rare variants of SCN10A gene with sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome in Chinese Han population

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Abstract

Sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome (SUNDS) remains an autopsy negative entity with unknown etiology to both forensic pathologists and physicians. The electrocardiogram (ECG) characteristics and clinical phenotype of SUNDS survivors strongly suggest that SUNDS shares some similarities with Brugada syndrome (BrS). Recently, the variants of sodium channel Nav 1.8 coding gene SCN10A were identified to be associated with BrS. Here, we investigated the association of SCN10A gene variants with 105 sporadic SUNDS victims and 22 BrS cases in the Chinese Han population. A total of 6 rare mutations and 16 polymorphisms were detected in SUNDS victims. Of the six rare mutations, two were putative pathogenic mutations (F386C and R1263*), one was a likely pathogenic mutation (R14H), and the other three were predicted as benign (R817Q, T1181M, and P1683S). As for the 16 polymorphisms, 1 was a novel polymorphism (c.4144-84G>A) located in intron 24, and the rest were reported previously including one polymorphism (c.2884A>G [I962V]) which showed a statistically significant difference in allele frequency (p = 0.044) between SUNDS and the control group. There were also 5 rare mutations and 15 polymorphisms detected in BrS cases. This is the first report of common and rare variants of SCN10A gene in SUNDS and BrS in the Chinese Han population, which provides the genetic epidemiological evidence that SCN10A may be a novel susceptibility gene for SUNDS and account for approximately 3 % of SUNDS in China.

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Acknowledgment

We thank Yichuan Gan and Xiaohan Liu for assistance in the statistical analysis. We appreciate Ran Tao for helpful review and discussion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forensic Pathology, Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-sen University, No. 74, Zhongshan 2nd Road, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510080, China

    Liyong Zhang, Lei Huang, Qiuping Wu, Jinxiang Zheng, Yeda Wu, Kun Yin & Jianding Cheng

  2. Detachment of Traffic Police, Public Security Bureau of Dongguan City, Dongguan, GD, 523000, China

    Feng Zhou

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  1. Liyong Zhang
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  2. Feng Zhou
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  3. Lei Huang
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Correspondence to Jianding Cheng.

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The project was approved for human research by the ethics committee of Sun Yat-sen University.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Informed consent was obtained from the patients or legal representatives of the victims.

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This work was supported by the Key Program (81430046) and the General Program (81172901) from the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

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Zhang, L., Zhou, F., Huang, L. et al. Association of common and rare variants of SCN10A gene with sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome in Chinese Han population. Int J Legal Med 131, 53–60 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-016-1397-1

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