Genetic Architecture of Pregnancy Loss: Co-inheritance of Risk Factors in Bosnian Women

Abstract

Pregnancy-related complications (PRC) re­present a serious public health and healthcare challenge. In European countries, infertility among couples varies from 5 to 24 %. The cause of PRC may include autoimmune and metabolic factors, correctness of the karyotype and variants of selected genes. The impact magnitude of genetic variants in one of PRC, pregnancy loss (PL), is still unexplored. Therefore, in this study, raw data on 12 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that were published separately in 2017–2019 were re-examined. We analysed the co-inheritance of 12 SNPs: rs6025 FV, rs429358 and rs7412 ApoE, rs1799752 ACE, rs1799889 PAI–1, rs1799963 PT, rs1801133 MTHFR, rs9468 and rs1800547 INV 17q21.31, rs731236 and rs1544410 VDR, and rs10421768 HAMP. Each time, the same study group of 154 women with PL, mean age 33 (± 5.4) years, and 154 mothers without PL, mean age 31.4 (± 6.7) years, with at least one live-born child, a control group, was investigated. In Bosnian women, no relationship of the co-inheritance pattern of any of the studied variants with PL was confirmed: P was in the range 0.248–1.0. In conclusion, the role of co-inheritance of heterozygotes and homozygotes or homozygotes of selected genes in PL has not been fully confirmed.