DELETION POLYMORPHISM AT THE ANGIOTENSIN-CONVERTING ENZYME GENE IN TURKISH PATIENTS WITH CORONARY-ARTERY DISEASE

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a multifactorial disease in which gen etic and environmental factors play an important role. These factors d iffer in each population. This study was carried out to determine whet her there is an association between insertion/deletion (I/D) polymorph ism and CAD in Turkish patients from Ankara. An I/D polymorphism in in tron 16 of the gene coding for the angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) has been used to study the role of this gene in the aetiology of coro nary atherosclerosis and hypertension. As there are no existing data f or the Turkish population, we studied the I/D polymorphism of the ACE gene in 218 patients with CAD and 107 controls. Polymerase chain react ion (PCR) was used for genotyping the I and D alleles. The DD polymorp hism of the ACE gene was significantly different between CAD subjects (0.733) and controls (0.612) (p = 0.002). The observed heterozygosity was 29.3% and 43.9% and D allele frequency was 0.733 and 0.612, respec tively. There was a significantly higher D allele (p = 0.03) in III pa tients with myocardial infarction (MI) compared with controls. Further more, MI localization also gave a significance of p = 0.002 for inferi or MI but not for anterior MT (p = 0.83). Forty-three hypertension pat ients had a D allele frequency of 0.767 which was significantly differ ent from control (p = 0.01). These data provide further evidence for t he association of D allele and CAD in a Turkish population.