Analysis of association between the Gln192Arg polymorphism of the paraoxonase gene and schizophrenia in humans.

An increasing amount of evidence suggests a possible implication of oxidative stress in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Oxidized low-density lipoproteins (oxLDL) have been reported to be capable of eliciting neurocytotoxicity. On the other hand, paraoxonase (PON1), an arylesterase, plays a role in protection against oxidative modifications of LDL and is considered to be one of the antioxidant enzymes. Thus, we investigated the genetic association between a functional polymorphism (Gln192Arg) of the human PON1 gene and schizophrenia in 244 patients and 177 controls. No significant association between the polymorphism and schizophrenia was observed. In addition, our results revealed that there was no association between the genotypes of the polymorphism and any demographic characteristics of patients such as gender, age, age at onset, or current neuroleptic dosage. Our results suggest that the Gln192Arg polymorphism of the PON1 gene may not be involved in the susceptibility to schizophrenia.