Assessment of Three New Loci from Genome-wide Association Study in Essential Tremor in Chinese population

Essential tremor (ET) is the most common tremor disorder. Evidences indicated that genetics plays an essential role in the researches of etiology. A new genome-wide association study (GWAS) from European population identified three novel loci in ET, which were rs10937625 in STK32B, rs17590046 in PPARGC1A, and rs12764057, rs10822974 and rs7903491 in CTNNA3. Due to the different genetic background in different population, we performed a case-control study to investigate these variants in a cohort of 533 subjects in Chinese population. We found a significant difference in the distributions of genotypes and alleles frequencies between ET and control groups of rs10937625 (genotype p = 0.037, OR = 0.69[0.48–0.98]; allele p = 0.033, OR = 0.82[0.69–0.99]) and rs7903491 (genotype p = 0.030, OR = 1.34[1.03–1.74]; allele p = 0.029, OR = 1.16[1.02–1.32]) after adjusted for age and gender. And no associations were detected between rs17590046 (genotype p = 0.794; allele p = 0.791), rs12764057 (genotype p = 0.337; allele p = 0.337), rs10822974 (genotype p = 0.102; allele p = 0.100) and ET in Chinese population individually. Our research supports that C allele of rs10937625 in STK32B is a protective factor and G allele of rs7903491 in CTNNA3 is a risk factor for ET in Chinese population.