Association Between Osteopontin Gene Polymorphisms and Cerebral Palsy in a Chinese Population.

Cerebral palsy (CP) is a neurological disorder affecting movement and posture that develops as a complication of prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal brain injury. Such non-progressive brain injury is often accompanied by neonatal encephalopathy and inflammation. The widely expressed soluble cytokine osteopontin (OPN) plays an important role in inflammation and neurological protection. Therefore, it is of great interest to study the relationship between CP and genetic variants of OPN. To explore the genetic association between OPN gene single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and CP in the Chinese Han population, five SNPs (rs2853744, rs2853749, rs11728697, rs4754, and rs1126616) were genotyped among 715 CP patients and 658 healthy controls using the MassArray platform. Statistical analysis was performed using the online SHEsis program, and Bonferroni correction was applied as necessary. We found an association between rs1126616 and global CP (corrected allelic P = 0.0006 and genotypic P = 0.0011 after Bonferroni correction). The other SNPs were not statistically associated with CP or any of its subgroups. By testing a relatively large sample size, our study demonstrates that the OPN gene SNP rs1126616 is statistically associated with CP. We suspect that the OPN gene might be a susceptibility factor for CP.