Latino Women Are Genetically Predisposed to Preterm Pregnancy

We know that a 5-year-old Peruvian girl is the world's youngest mother and Latino women may not be very big. But a new study carried out at the Yale School of Medicine and presented at the Society for Maternal
Fetal Medicine Annual Meeting has discovered that the gene ENPP1 is connected to preterm birth and low birth weight in the case of the Hispanic women.

12 % of the American children are born prematurely (before 37 weeks of pregnancy). This is connected to health issues, especially in the case of children born before 28 weeks of pregnancy. It is unclear what causes the preterm births in most cases, but "both the genetic make-up of the mother and the genetic make-up of the baby play a role," said co-author Dr. Errol Norwitz, associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at Yale.

African-American women had already been found to have a genetic predisposition to preterm births, even when socioeconomic status, demographics, medical history and multiple pregnancies were taken into account.

"Multiple genes or a single particular genetic variant—single nucleotide polymorphism—may be involved," said Norwitz.

The research team compared DNA from Hispanic mothers who had had preterm birth and women who had had only full-term pregnancies. The DNA for 128 different gene alleles (variations) was screened in 77 candidate genes. Those alleles were known to cause various conditions, but now they have been investigated for the first time in the context of preterm birth.

4 alleles were connected to premature birth, and one allele of the ENPP1 gene proved to be the strongest on causing preterm birth. ENPP1 was associated with insulin resistance and glucose intolerance (both linked to high predisposition to type-2 diabetes), and even to hardening of the arteries and hypertension.

"In the context of prematurity, it is possible that the variant form of ENPP1 is associated with deranged energy metabolism," wrote the researchers.

"In our original study, 85 % of the population was Hispanic. It appears that there are genetic variations unique to each ethnic population. We are now in the process of validating our findings in African-American, Caucasian and Native-American populations," said Norwitz.