Association study of FGF18 with developmental dyslexia in Chinese population.

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a neurobiological disorder featured by reading disabilities. In recent years, genome-wide approaches provided new perspectives to discover novel candidate genes of DD. In a previous study, rs9313548 located downstream of FGF18 showed borderline genome-wide significant association with DD. Herein, we selected rs9313548 and 11 independent tag single nucleotide polymorphisms covering gene region of FGF18 to perform association analysis with DD among 978 Chinese dyslexic cases and 998 controls recruited from elementary schools. However, we did not observe any single nucleotide polymorphism exceeding significant threshold. Our preliminary results suggested that FGF18 might not be a susceptibility gene for DD in Chinese population.