Introduction: Schizophrenia is a severe neuropsychiatric disorder with high heritability. A single nucleotide polymorphism rs1625579 in the miR-137 gene has recently been reported to confer risk of schizophrenia by a genome-wide association study in populations of European ancestry. However, subsequent association studies in Asian populations yielded inconsistent results.
Materials and methods: To carry out a systematic meta-analysis of rs1625579 with schizophrenia in Asian populations, we collected phenotypic and genetic data from individual replication samples of up to 11 887 schizophrenic patients, 16 660 normal controls, and 579 families.
Results: The results from analysis after pooling all the eligible case-control and family-based samples suggest that rs1625579 was not associated with schizophrenia in Asian populations (P=0.161, odds ratio=1.074). Moderate genetic heterogeneity was found between individual samples (P=0.130, I=34.7%). 'Leave-one-out' sensitivity analysis showed that removal of any of the individual samples did not lead to significant associations.
Conclusion: We could not confirm the significant association of rs1625579 with schizophrenia in Asian samples, which may have resulted from potential genetic heterogeneity on this locus between continental populations.