Study On The Relationship Between Chitotriosidase And Coronary Heart Disease

Objective This study was undertaken to investigate the serum activity of chitotriosidase and its genetic polymorphism, and analyze the relation between serum activity of chitotriosidase, CRP, IL-6 in subjects with different states of coronary heart disease.Methods 126 patients who were subject to coronary angiography(CAG) were divided into different groups according to the number of stenosis branches. The activities of chitotriosidase, CRP, IL-6 were measured then compared with control group and analyzed for their clinical significance. We also assayed a common chitotriosidase gene polymorphism that is a 24-base pair duplication in exon 10, which causes deficiency in chitotriosidase acitivity.Results The levels of serum chitotriosidase, Lp(a), C-reactive and IL-6 were much higher in pathological group than in control group. Also they were much higher in ACS group than in SCHD group(P<0.01). The serum activities of chitotriosidase and Lp(a) increases along with the range of stenosis and were higher in patients with multiple branch stenosis than that in patients with single artery stenosis (P<0.01). Significant differences of serum activities of chitotriosidase and Lp(a) were observed in patients with different artery stenosis degrees (P<0.05). The two parameters of 75-100% stenosis group is significantly higer than that of 50-75% stenosis group. The conentrations of TC, LDL-C, CRP, IL-6 have no significant differences in groups with different stenosis levels and branches. There were no significant difference in the concentration of HDL-C in subgoups of CHD. The results of polymorphism suggest that there were no differences in the allelic and genotype distributions between the studied groups(P>0.05).Discussion (1) Chitotriosidase may be used to reflect the functions of macrophages in patients with artherosclerosis as the marker of activated macrophages. We can hypothesize that dynamically measuring the serum activity of chitotriosidase can lead to panorama of the functions of macrophages and the differentiation of SCHD and non-SCHD. (2) The activity of chitotriosidase is related to the range and level of cornary artery stenosis and may be used as a marker of progression of atherosclerosis. (3) We did not find that there were significances of different genotypes(NN, ND and DD) and alleles(N and D) between CHD patients and control objects. This polymorphism may not be a impressionable factor to CHD in Chinese people.