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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 2|pp 1433—1445

Association between TNF-alpha polymorphism and the age of first suicide attempt in chronic patients with schizophrenia

Xiaoe Lang1, Tammy H. Trihn2, Hanjing Emily Wu2, Yongsheng Tong3, Meihong Xiu3, Xiang Yang Zhang4,5
  • 1Department of Psychiatry, The First Clinical Medical College, Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China
  • 2Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX 77030, USA
  • 3Peking University HuiLongGuan Clinical Medical School, Beijing HuiLongGuan Hospital, Beijing, China
  • 4CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
  • 5Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Received: October 20, 2019Accepted: December 25, 2019Published: January 18, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102692

Copyright: © 2020 Lang et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) exhibit higher suicide rates than the general population. However, the molecular mechanism remains poorly understood. Tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha polymorphisms have been repeatedly indicated to play a pathogenetic role in various mental disorders, but none of these studies focused on the susceptibility to suicidal behavior in SCZ. We recruited 1087 chronic inpatients with SCZ and 576 controls to assess the psychopathological symptoms of SCZ using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale scales. We selected 2 polymorphisms (-308G>A and -1031C>T) in the TNF-alpha gene and analyzed their associations with SCZ and suicide. Our results showed that TNF-alpha -308G>A and -1031C>T were not related to SCZ and suicide. However, we found that suicide attempters with the C allele carriers exhibited suicidal behaviors significantly later than those with TT genotype in the SCZ patients. The haplotype containing the T allele of the -1031 was significantly associated with the age of suicide initiation. Further logistic regression analysis showed that -1031C>T interacted with psychopathological symptoms and drinking, age of smoking, and related to the initiation age of suicide attempts. Our study demonstrated that the TNF-alpha variants may affect the age at which suicide attempts started among SCZ suicide attempters.