Clinical relevance of LINC00152 and its variants in western Chinese tuberculosis patients

Recent studies indicate that the long intergenic non-coding RNA LINC00152 plays crucial roles in various human diseases. Here, we investigated whether levels of LINC00152 or its genetic variants correlate with the clinical features of tuberculosis (TB) in western Chinese patients. We genotyped the single nucleotide polymorphism LINC00152 rs80292941 in 476 TB patients and 475 healthy subjects using a custom-by-design 48-Plex SNPscan Kit, and measured relative levels of LINC00152 using RT-qPCR. We observed that LINC00152 levels were lower in TB patients than controls. Moreover, rs80292941 TT genotype carriers had the lowest LINC00152 levels among TB patients, and rs80292941 AA genotype carriers are more likely to suffer from hepatotoxicity induced by antituberculosis therapy [OR = 3.97, 95% = 1.53-10.13, p = 0.002]. Our findings strongly suggest that LINC00152 may promote TB progression and highlight rs80292941 single nucleotide polymorphism as a novel predisposition marker for antituberculosis drug-induced hepatotoxicity.