Association of plasma metallothionein 3 and its polymorphisms with childhood autism / 中华实用儿科临床杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To investigate the association of plasma metallothionein 3 (MT3) and its polymorphisms with childhood autism,in order to provide the objective evidence for autistic etiology and molecular diagnosis.Methods A total of 132 autistic children were recruited from several special autism training schools in Wuhan and the Hubei Maternal and Child Health Hospital between January 2011 and November 2014.Three hundred and sixteen healthy children from the out-patients of Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University during the same period were enrolled as healthy controls.Enzyme linked immunosorbent assay was utilized to measure plasma MT3 protein levels in a dataset of 81 cases and 80 controls,while eight single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) located in MT3 gene were genotyped in another greater dataset that included 132 cases and 236 controls by the matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time of flight mass spectrometry within the Sequenom platform.Results Plasma MT3 protein level was significantly lower in autistic group compared to healthy controls [(740.0 ± 327.4) ng/L vs (1 007.1 ± 554.3) ng/L,P ＜ 0.001],particularly for boys when stratified by gender (P =0.005).No difference existed in any allele or genotype frequencies between the 2 groups (all P ＞ 0.05).Conclusions The selected autistic children harbored abnormal expression profiles of plasma MT3 protein,which may have no connection with its gene polymorphisms.