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Neurogenetics (2010) 11:367368 DOI 10.1007/s10048-010-0242-9
LETTER TO THE EDITORS
Questionable association between a monoamine oxidase A promoter polymorphism and sudden infantdeath syndrome
Michael Klintschar & Christian Heimbold
Received: 9 March 2010 /Accepted: 11 March 2010 /Published online: 1 April 2010 # The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Sirs,
We have read with interest the article Association of dopamine transporter and monoamine oxidase molecular polymorphisms with sudden infant death syndrome and stillbirth: new insights into the serotonin hypothesis by Filonzi et al. in a recent edition of Neurogenetics [1]. The authors have presented a study on two polymorphisms, one of those a functional length polymorphism in the promoter region of the monoamineoxidase A (MAOA) gene, in 20 cases of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and five cases of stillbirth compared to healthy controls. The main conclusion from the paper seems to be that MAOA allele 4R (with increased transcriptional activity) is significantly more common in SIDS than in controls.
There are, however, severe concerns that this conclusion could be incorrect:
1. The most problematic point of the study is that the authors obviously were not aware that MAOA is an X-chromosomal locus. They tested 25 cases, 13 of these male...