, Fuding Serum Soluble Corin Is Decreased in Stroke

S troke is the leading cause of long-term disability and mortality in China. 1 There are currently at least 7 million Chinese having stroke and ≈2 million new and recurrent strokes diagnosed each year. 2 Improved identification of those at risk of stroke might improve prevention. This has led to a search for new risk factors for stroke. Recently, increased natriuretic peptides were suggested to be risk factors for stroke, although the mechanism is not clear. 3,4 Human corin, a type II transmembrane serine protease highly expressed in the heart, 5,6 played a physiological role in the activation of natri-uretic peptides. 7 This indicated a potential role of human corin in stroke. Human corin has been found to be decreased in the circulation among patients with heart failure 8 and acute coronary syndrome. 9 Given the connections between cardiac dysfunc-tion and stroke, circulating corin might be a candidate marker of stroke risk. However, to date, the association between circulating corin and stroke has not yet been studied in humans. Here, we aimed to study the serum levels of corin in patients with stroke and community-based controls. Moreover, circulating corin was reported to be varied between men and women. 8 The association between serum soluble corin and stroke was studied in men and women individually. Because there is little information on the role of corin in stroke cause, Background and Purpose—Soluble corin was decreased in coronary heart disease. Given the connections between cardiac dysfunction and stroke, circulating corin might be a candidate marker of stroke risk. However, the association between circulating corin and stroke has not yet been studied in humans. Here, we aimed to examine the association in patients wtith stroke and community-based healthy controls. Methods—Four hundred eighty-one patients with ischemic stroke, 116 patients with hemorrhagic stroke, and 2498 healthy controls were studied. Serum soluble corin and some conventional risk factors of stroke were examined. Because circulating corin was reported to be varied between men and women, the association between serum soluble corin and stroke was evaluated in men and women, respectively. Results—Patients with ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke had a significantly lower level of serum soluble corin than healthy controls in men and women (all P values, <0.05). In multivariate analysis, men in the lowest quartile of serum soluble corin were more likely to have ischemic (odds ratio [OR], 4.90; 95% confidence interval, 2.99–8.03) and hemorrhagic (OR, 17.57; 95% confidence …