Several previous studies indicated that genetic polymorphisms in inflammatory factor genes were associated with glioma risk. However, the relationship between the prostaglandin-endoperoxide synthase 2 (PTGS2) genetic polymorphism and glioma remains unclear in the Chinese population. We selected 199 histologically confirmed adult glioma patients and 199 cancer-free controls for the present study...

INTRODUCTION The cytolysis mediated by granules is one of the most important effector functions of cytotoxic T lymphocytes and natural killer cells. Recently, three single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were identified at exons 2, 3, and 5 of the granzyme B gene, resulting in a haplotype in which three amino acids of mature protein Q48P88Y245 are changed to R48A88H245, which leads to loss of c...

Low-frequency variants showed that there is more power to detect risk variants than to detect protective variants in complex diseases. Aldosterone plays an important role in the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, and aldosterone synthase catalyzes the speed-controlled steps of aldosterone biosynthesis. Polymorphisms of the aldosterone synthase gene (CYP11B2) have been reported to be associat...

PURPOSE The polymorphisms of the Fc receptor-like 3 gene (FCRL3), a novel immunoregulatory gene, have been shown to be associated with certain autoimmune diseases. This study was designed to examine whether the polymorphisms of FCRL3 are associated with susceptibility to Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada (VKH) syndrome in a Chinese population. METHODS A case-control study was performed in 230 Chinese VKH ...

Association-based linkage disequilibrium (LD) mapping is an increasingly important tool for localizing genes that show potential influence on human aging and longevity. As haplotypes contain more LD information than single markers, a haplotype-based LD approach can have increased power in detecting associations as well as increased robustness in statistical testing. In this paper, we develop a ...

OBJECTIVE To replicate the associations of leukocyte telomere length (LTL) with variants at four loci and to investigate their associations with coronary heart disease (CHD) and type II diabetes (T2D), in order to examine possible causal effects of telomere maintenance machinery on disease aetiology. METHODS Four SNPs at three loci BICD1 (rs2630578 GγC), 18q12.2 (rs2162440 GγT), and OBFC1 (rs...

PURPOSE Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is considered a cytokine-responsive tumor. The clinical course of a patient may thus be influenced by the patient's capacity to produce distinct cytokines. Therefore, cytokine gene polymorphisms in RCC patients were analyzed to determine haplotype combinations with prognostic significance. PATIENTS AND METHODS A selection of 21 single nucleotide polymorphism...

human serum paraoxonase (hupon1:   ec 3.1.8.1), a calcium-dependent esterase, is synthesized in the liver and   widely distributed in tissues including liver, kidney, intestine, and serum,   where it is associated exclusively with high-density lipoprotein.  human paraoxonase-1 plays an important role   in prevention of atherosclerosis and also protection against organophosphate-induced   neurot...

MOTIVATION The observation of positive selection acting on a mutant indicates that the corresponding mutation has some form of functional relevance. Determining the fitness effects of mutations thus has relevance to many interesting biological questions. One means of identifying beneficial mutations in an asexual population is to observe changes in the frequency of marked subsets of the populat...

Risk alleles for complex diseases are widely spread throughout human populations. However, little is known about the geographic distribution and frequencies of risk alleles, which may contribute to differences in disease susceptibility and prevalence among populations. Here, we focus on Crohn's disease (CD) as a model for the evolutionary study of complex disease alleles. Recent genome-wide ass...