Abstract
Background and Aims—Adiponectin, an adipose-secreted protein that has been linked to insulin sensitivity, plasma lipids, and inflammatory patterns, is an established biomarker for metabolic health. Despite clinical relevance and high heritability, the determinants of plasma adiponectin levels remain poorly understood.
Methods and Results—We conducted the first epigenome-wide cross-sectional study of adiponectin levels using methylation data on 368,051 cytosine-phosphate-guanine (CpG) sites in CD4+ T-cells from the Genetics of Lipid Lowering Drugs and Diet Network (GOLDN, n= 991). We fit linear mixed models, adjusting for age, sex, study site, T-cell purity, and family. We have identified a positive association (regression coefficient ± SE= 0.01 ± 0.001, P=3.4x10−13) between plasma adiponectin levels and methylation of a CpG site in CPT1A, a key player in fatty acid metabolism. The association was replicated (n=474, P=0.0009) in whole blood samples from the Amish participants of the Heredity and Phenotype Intervention (HAPI) Heart Study as well as White (n=592, P=0.0005) but not Black (n=243, P=0.18) participants of the Bogalusa Heart Study (BHS). The association remained significant upon adjusting for BMI and smoking in GOLDN and HAPI but not BHS. We also identified associations between methylation loci in RNF145 and UFM1 and plasma adiponectin in GOLDN and White BHS participants, although the association was not robust to adjustment for BMI or smoking.
Conclusion—We have identified and replicated associations between several biologically plausible loci and plasma adiponectin. These findings support the importance of epigenetic processes in metabolic traits, laying the groundwork for future translational applications.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-2017
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.numecd.2016.11.004
Funding Information
This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, grant U01HL072524-04. The Amish HAPI Heart Study was supported by NIH grants U01HL072515 and P30DK072488. The BHS was supported by grants 5R01ES021724 from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and 2R01AG016592 from the National Institute on Aging. Shengxu Li is partly supported by grant 13SDG14650068 from American Heart Association.
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Refer to Web version on PubMed Central for supplementary material.
Repository Citation
Aslibekyan, S.; Do, A. N.; Xu, H.; Li, S.; Irvin, M. R.; Zhi, D; Tiwari, H. K.; Absher, D. M.; Shuldiner, A. R.; Zhang, T.; Chen, W.; Tanner, K.; Hong, C.; Mitchell, B. D.; Berenson, G.; and Arnett, Donna K., "CPT1A Methylation Is Associated with Plasma Adiponectin" (2017). Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications. 49.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/epidemiology_facpub/49
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Notes/Citation Information
Published in Nutrition, Metabolism & Cardiovascular Diseases, v. 27, issue 3, p. 225-233.
© 2016 The Italian Society of Diabetology, the Italian Society for the Study of Atherosclerosis, the Italian Society of Human Nutrition, and the Department of Clinical Medicine and Surgery, Federico II University. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
This manuscript version is made available under the CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
The document available for download is the author's post-peer-review final draft of the article.