Chronic Diseases Prevention Review

Previous studies have suggested a critical role for interleukin IL-17F in innate and adaptive immunity in vivo and its abnormal expression was found to play a bridging role in several neurological disorders. In this study, we investigated the association between functional polymorphisms in IL-17F and Tourette’s syndrome (TS) in a Chinese Han population. We recruited 407 TS nuclear family trios (325 male cases and 82 female cases each with their parents) and 417 controls (321 male and 96 female), and performed TaqMan allelic discrimination real-time PCR to genotype two polymorphisms in IL-17F, rs1889570 and rs763780. The transmission disequilibrium test (TDT) and haplotype relative risk (HRR) were used to estimate genetic susceptibility. In addition, we designed a classic case–control study to identify differences in the genetic distributions of these polymorphisms. No transmission disequilibrium was found between the IL-17F tag polymorphisms rs1889570 and rs763780 and TS (rs1889570: TDT=1.35, P=0.266, HRR=1.327, χ=3.812, P=0.051, 95%CI=0.999-1.763, haplotype-based HRR (HHRR)=1.127, χ=1.371, P=0.242, 95%CI=0.923-1.376; rs763780: TDT=3.10, P=0.092, HRR=0.74, χ=3.00, P=0.083, 95%CI=0.526-1.041, HHRR=0.75, χ=3.146, P=0.076, 95%CI=0.546-1.031). The allelic frequencies and genotypic distributions were compared by Pearson’s chi-square test, which also indicated there was no remarkable difference between the TS patients and the controls. Our research indicated that the genetic variants of rs763780 and rs1889570 in IL-17F may not play a crucial role in the pathogenesis of TS in a Chinese Han population. However, these findings should be confirmed in other ethnic populations.