Hypermethylation of SCNN 1 A gene-body increases the risk of essential hypertension

The goal of this study was to investigate the contribution of nonvoltage-gated 1 alpha subunit (SCNN1A) gene-body methylation of essential hypertension (EH), and to explore whether the methylation level could be altered by antihypertensive therapy. Our study performed methylation analysis of peripheral blood DNA using bisulphite pyrosequencing technology among 60 non-EH controls, 60 incident EH cases and 60 prevalent EH cases. Our results reported that the incident cases had a higher SCNN1A methylation level than the non-EH controls (16.15±4.51 versus 13.66±4.08, P=0.041), and prevalent cases (16.15±4.51 versus 13.77±3.90, P=0.002). Logistic regression analysis results showed that SCNN1A hypermethylation was the risk factor of EH in incident cases compared with non-EH (OR=1.157, P=0.01), and in incident cases compared with prevalent cases (OR=1.149, P=0.013). The SCNN1A methylation level was found to be positively correlated with age in non-EH (r=0.343, P=0.007). Significantly higher methylation level was identified in female than male in non-EH (t=3.878, P=2.71×10-4). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis revealed that 10.833% methylation level is an appropriate cut-off value for the SCNN1A gene-body methylation to predict the onset of EH between non-EH and incident cases (area under curve: 0.638, P<0.009, 95% CI: 0.539~0.736). In conclusion, our study indicated hypermethylation of SCNN1A gene-body was associated with the risk of EH, SCNN1A gene-body methylation has an important diagnostic value to EH, and SCNN1A gene-body methylation level could be modified by age, gender and antihypertensive therapy.