Association Analysis of Polymorphisms in ROCK2 with Cardiovascular Disease in a Chinese Population

Background Rho-kinase (ROCK) has been shown to play an important role in cardiovascular disease such as coronary artery disease (CAD) and hypertension. Recently, common variants of ROCK2 have been reported to influence blood pressure, but the relationship between common ROCK2 variants and cardiovascular disease has not been extensively studied in the Chinese population. Methods To derive a more precise estimation of their relationship, we screened for the common variants by direct sequencing of all exons of ROCK2 , and then we performed genetic association analyses in a CAD case–control study, including a total of 1344 cases and 1267 ethnically and geographically matched controls. Results Unconditional logistic regression showed that no significant association between common variants in the coding region of ROCK2 and CAD was observed in our study (for rs978906, OR = 0.92, 95% CI 0.72–1.20 and P  = 0.63; for rs2230774, OR = 0.90, 95% CI 0.70–1.16 and P  = 0.47; for rs56304104, OR = 0.97, 95% CI 0.70–1.31 and P  = 0.83; respectively). Conclusions The relationship between the ROCK2 polymorphisms and cardiovascular disease risk cannot be entirely discounted and warrants further evaluation in a large population.