Original Article

The lipoprotein lipase (LPL) gene has been investigated extensively in linkage studies and in studies of its association with lipid profiles and coronary artery disease (CAD), and this gene has also been reported to have an association with hypertension. In our previous linkage study on 148 Chinese hypertensive families, the regions at or near the LPL gene were found to be associated with systolic blood pressure (SBP) and di-astolic blood pressure (DBP). Thus the LPL gene is a logical candidate gene for involvement in the underly-ing cause of essential hypertension (EH). In the present study, we identified 22 sequence variants by directly sequencing 10 exons and flanking regions of the LPL gene, and investigated the occurrence of 3 of these variants, IVS4-214C＞T, 7754C＞A and S447X, in a case-control study including 501 normotensive (NT) sub-jects and 497 EH subjects. In males, the frequencies of the genotypes of each of the 3 variants did not differ significantly between the NT and EH groups. Among the EH group in females, ANCOVA revealed no signifi-cant difference in blood pressure levels according to the 7754C＞A genotype. However, in female, the distri-bution of the 7754C＞A genotype and the frequency of the A allele of 7754C＞A differed significantly be-tween the NT and EH groups ( p＝0.032 and p＝0.027, respectively) with 0.78 (95 % confidence interval (CI): 0.56 to 1.07; p＝0.12) of odds ratio for the A allele. Moreover, haplotype analysis revealed that T-A-C and T-C-G haplotypes (in the order of IVS4-214C＞T, 7754C＞A and S447X) were statistically more frequent in th