ASSOCIATION OF SOME POLYMORPHISMS IN IL4, NOD2 AND CCR5 GENESWITH CHILDHOOD ASTHMA

Abstract

BACKGROUND Asthma is most common serious chronic disease of childhood. Asthma is inflammatorydisease of respiratory tract of unknown etiology. As is usual in most complex diseases,also in asthma genetic and environmental factors participate together. More than 100candidate genes are connected with asthma for now, but each of them has only smallcontribution in the pathogenesis of the disease. METHODS We included 111 children with mild or moderate persistent asthma, aged between 5 and18 years. 76 of them were atopics and 35 had nonatopic asthma. We measured some basicclinical and laboratory parameters. Data from 77 healthy children served as a controlgroup. We genotyped polymorphisms CCR5-delta32, IL4 C-33T and NOD2 R702W. Wecompared allelic frequencies between groups with ?2 and Fischer’s exact test. With t test fortwo independent samples we studied influence of genotype on clinical and laboratoryparameters. RESULTS Patients with nonatopic asthma had significantly lower frequency of CCR5-delta32 allele(1.39 %), compared with control group (10 %), p = 0.016. In other two tested polymorphismswe didn’t found any significant differences in allelic frequencies between asthmatics andcontrols. We revealed no influence of genotype on clinical and laboratory parameters. CONCLUSIONS Delta32 mutation in CCR5 gene protects against nonatopic asthma. Polymorphisms C-33Tin IL4 gene and R702W in NOD2 gene are not associated with asthma. We didn’t detectany influence of tested polymorphisms on clinical and laboratory parameters. Results ofour study offer new insights into asthma pathogenesis and could contribute in the development of new strategies of asthma management