Association of specific language impairment candidate genes CMIP and ATP2C2 with developmental dyslexia in Chinese population

Developmental dyslexia (DD) and specific language impairment (SLI) are distinct language disorders. Their phenotypic overlap and co-morbidity are frequently reported. In addition, numerous evidences indicate that genetic factors play an important role in DD and SLI. Therefore, it is worthwhile to identify possible genetic linkage shared by these two disorders. Here, we selected 178 Tag SNPs from two SLI candidate genes (CMIP and ATP2C2) and performed high density genotyping in a large unrelated Chinese DD cohort with 502 dyslexic cases and 522 healthy controls. Although some SNPs showed significant association (Pmin = 0.0016) with DD through case-control based association analysis, none of them survived Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. Thus, the association of SLI candidate genes CMIP and ATP2C2 with DD in Chinese population should be further validated and their contribution to DD should be interpreted with caution.