The relationship between ACE/AGT gene polymorphisms and the risk of diabetic retinopathy in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes

AIMS: This study aims to investigate the association between renin-angiotensin system gene polymorphism and diabetic retinopathy (DR) in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes. METHODS: We consecutively included 1491 patients for the assessment of ACE I/D and AGT M/T gene polymorphisms in 345 DR cases and 1146 patients without retinopathy (DNR). Albuminuria was defined by urine albumin creatinine ratio and albumin excretion rate. RESULTS: Compared with the NDR patients, the DR cases displayed a higher proportion of diabetic nephropathy (32.68% vs. 6.52%, χ(2) = 150.713, p < 0.001). The DR cases and DNR individuals did not differ in the frequency of genotypes and alleles of ACE I/D and AGT M/T (all p > 0.05). Intriguingly, DR patients with obesity showed higher frequency of DD (χ(2) = 4.181, p = 0.041), but no significant difference exists in the other stratified BMI and hypertension analyses (all p > 0.05). Binary logistic regression displays that the association of the ACE and AGT gene polymorphisms in DR patients is not significant after adjusting for confounding covariates in all the comparisons. CONCLUSIONS: The ACE and AGT gene polymorphisms are not associated with the progress of diabetes developing into retinopathy in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes. However, more investigations are needed to further prove the association.