The main finding of the present study was that the presence of the rare allele C in the HTR2B rs17619600 SNP conferred an increased risk of GDM in the population evaluated. In addition to the analysis of isolated SNP, the TACC haplotype, which contains the aforementioned allele, was associated with a higher risk of GDM.
HTR2B encodes a Gαq-coupled 5-HT receptor. 5-HT is believed to be critical in regulating pancreatic beta cell proliferation (7, 9). In pregnant rodent islets, there is an increase in the expression of HTR2B during the period of increased beta cell replication; blocking the signaling of this receptor prevents the expansion of these cells and is associated with GDM (8). In human islets, the activation of this receptor is associated with GSIS (7, 21). Thus, 5-HT signaling through HTR2B plays an important role in the maintenance of glycemic homeostasis during pregnancy (15, 22, 23).
The only study that evaluated the SNP rs17619600 in HTR2B found no association with GDM. However, it was a case-control study which compared women with GDM with non-pregnant women, aged 60 and older with no personal and family history of DM. The study did not find any association of this SNP with weight gain during pregnancy, postpartum BMI, FPG, or fasting insulin concentration in women with GDM. Additionally, this variant did not associate with waist circumference and BMI in non-diabetic control subjects and in the independent population cohort from the Korean Genome Epidemiology Study, or with T2D in this same cohort (24).
No functional studies were performed with rs17619600, but according to the GTEx Consortium atlas, this SNP has the potential to be functional, as it has a cis-expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) effect, that is, it modulates gene expression by influencing its transcription rate (25). In 7 out of 9 tissues evaluated, the presence of the allele C was associated with a lower expression of the HTR2B gene.
Given these findings, we hypothesized that SNP rs17619600 could modulate the expression of the HTR2B gene in beta cells. Thus, in presence of the rare allele C, there would be a lower expression of this receptor, which could impair maternal beta cell adaptation. The finding that carriers of the genotypes containing the allele C presented a higher AUC of plasma glucose during OGTT than carriers of the TT genotype corroborate that SNP rs17619600 influences glucose homeostasis, probably affecting insulin release, since activation of HTR2B promotes GSIS.
This study has the limitation of having been carried out in a tertiary hospital, in which a significant number of patients have other comorbidities. The small number of patients who used insulin, only 84 participants, made it difficult to assess the association of SNPs with GDM severity. As GDM is a prevalent clinical condition, the lack of replication in an independent population and the sample size are also limitations of the study, although the present series is larger than those included in several previously published studies (26–30).