Macrophage Migration Inhibitory Factor - 173 G/C Polymorphism is Associated With The Age of Onset and Insight in Schizophrenia in the Turkish Population

ABSTRACT

Objective

To evaluate the genetic variant in the macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) −173 G/C in patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) by comparing genotype distributions of MIF −173 G/C between patients and healthy controls considering clinical parameters.

Methods

A sample of 118 patients with SCZ and 100 healthy volunteers were included in the study. The patients were evaluated with some scales in terms of clinical features (symptom severity, level of insight, age of onset, and treatment resistance). The polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) was used to determine gene polymorphism.

Results

There was a statistically significant difference between the allele frequency (G, C) distributions of SCZ patients with early- and adult-onset. The C allele frequency was significantly higher in SCZ patients with early-onset (p = .033). According to the impairment of insight, we observed statistically significant differences in genotype (GG, GC, CC) distributions between SCZ patients with good and poor insight. SCZ patients with poor insight had a higher GG genotype frequency than SCZ patients with good insight (p = .021). Again, there was a statistically significant difference between genotype groups (GG, GC/CC) regarding the age of illness onset (p = .037) and schedule for assessing the three components of insight (SATCI) score (p = .005). While the age of onset of SCZ was significantly earlier in patients with the GC/CC genotype, SATCI scores of SCZ patients with the GG genotype were significantly lower than SCZ patients with GC/CC genotype.

Conclusions

MIF −173 G/C polymorphism may be associated with the age of illness onset and impairment of insight in SCZ.

KEYWORDS:

• Schizophrenia
• inflammation
• macrophage migration inhibitory factor
• MIF
• single nucleotide polymorphism
• age of onset
• impairment of insight

Acknowledgments

We want to thank all patients and healthy controls for their willingness to participate in the present study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Contributions of authors

HMA and SP are responsible for developing overarching research goals and aims, data integrity, and data analysis accuracy. HMA, MSY, YO, and SP conceived and designed the study. SP and YO are the responsible provisions of study materials and laboratory samples. HMA drafted the manuscript. All authors critically revised the manuscript. SP and MSY supervised the study.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work.