An assessment of the effect of the genotype on postoperative venous thromboembolism risk in 140,831 surgical patients

Background: Postoperative Venous Thromboembolism Events (VTE) constitute a major source of morbidity and mortality after surgery. The aim of this study was to investigate whether commonly occurring Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) are associated with VTE in the surgical setting.

Methods: Retrospective study using data from the United Kingdom (UK) biobank, a genome biobank containing healthcare and genotyping data from more than 500.000 individuals. A cohort of 140,831patients with a registered surgical procedure was identified and used for a discovery genome wide association study (GWAS), with the remainder of the cohort (305,349 non-surgical patients) used as a replication cohort. Primary outcome was associations between SNPs and VTE within 30 days after a surgical procedure. Genome wide significance was set at p = 5 × 10-8.

Results: In the surgical (discovery) cohort, no SNPs reached genome wide significance. The VTE association of the top candidate SNP in the ABO gene rs505922 (p = 3.33 × 10-7), was replicated in the general (replication) cohort (p = 2.42 × 10-59).

Conclusions: and Relevance: This study did not identify associations between SNPs and postoperative VTE events reaching genome-wide significance, although the VTE relevance of top candidates were demonstrated.