No Association Between IL12B Gene Polymorphisms and Graves’ Disease in the Chinese Population

Abstract

Background. Graves’ disease (GD) is one of the most common autoimmune thyroid disorders and has a striking characteristic of female preponderance. Objective. The main objective of this study was to investigate whether IL12B gene polymorphisms were associated with either GD itself or with gender bias in GD. Methods. GD patients (151 males, 97 females) and 211 healthy control subjects without antithyroid autoantibodies or a family history of autoimmune disorders were recruited for this study. The G/C polymorphism (rs6887695) of the IL12B gene was analyzed using the polymerase chain reaction–restriction fragment length polymorphism, and the deletion and insertion polymorphism (rs41292470) in the IL12B promoter was detected after polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis–silver staining method. Results. There was no significant difference between GD patients and normal subjects, and no differences in frequencies of genotypes or alleles of either polymorphism between male and female GD subjects. Conclusion. We conclude that these IL12B gene polymorphisms were not associated with sex bias in GD and do not confer susceptibility to Graves’ disease (GD) in the Chinese population.

• Polymorphism
• IL-12
• SCGB3A2
• Male
• Grave’s disease

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge all physicians and nurses in this hospital involved in collecting DNA samples for this study. We declare that we have no financial, consulting, and personal relationship with other people and other organization that can inappropriately influence our work; there is no professional or other personal interest of any nature or kind in any product, service, and/or company that could be construed as influencing the position presented in, or review of, the manuscript entitled.

Declaration of Interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.