Common variants of a urate-associated gene LRP2 are not associated with gout susceptibility

A recent genome-wide association study revealed that there is an association between serum uric acid (SUA) levels and rs2544390, a common variant in low-density lipoprotein-related protein 2 (LRP2/Megalin) gene. Two other variants of LRP2, rs2229268 and rs3755166, are also found to have associations with dyslipidemia and Alzheimer’s disease, respectively, which also could have a relationship with SUA in human. Although no studies report that LRP2 transports urate, LRP2 is a multi-ligand receptor and expresses in many tissues including kidney, suggesting a direct and/or indirect relationship with gout. In the present study, we investigated the association between gout and these variants of LRP2 with 741 clinically diagnosed male gout patients and 1,302 controls. As a result, the three common LRP2 variants, rs2544390, rs2229268 and rs3755166, showed no association with gout (P = 0.76, 0.55, and 0.22, respectively). Our study is the first to reveal that an SUA-related gene LRP2 is not involved in gout susceptibility.