OBJECTIVES : Th e interferon-α (IFN-α) therapy for HCV hepatitis may exacerbate or induce underlying thyroid disorders. Besides viral factors, the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) may be an independent risk factor. METHODS : We evaluated fi ft een patients with HCV chronic hepatitis during a period of 40 months. At the enrolment, all the patients were negative for thyroid disorders, excluding one ...

AIM To explore whether predisposition to autoimmune gastritis (AIG) is found in human leukocyte antigen (HLA), cytokine or killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptor (KIR) gene variations. METHODS Twelve Finnish patients with autoimmune-type severe atrophy of the gastric corpus were included. The patients' serum was analyzed for pepsinogen I and Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) antibodies. DNA w...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the frequency of HLA classes I and II and their association with the cutaneous manifestation of rheumatoid vasculitis (RV) in Brazilian patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS During one year we selected 130 patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) classified according to the American College of Rheumatology, 1987. All patients underwent a clinical and laboratory questionnaire to ...

HIV-1 controllers (HIC) are extremely rare patients with the ability to control viral replication, maintain unchanging CD4 T-cell count, and evade disease progression for extensive periods of time, in the absence of antiretroviral therapy. In order to establish the representation of key genetic correlates of atypical disease progression within a cohort of HIV-1+ individuals who control viral re...

Taiwan experienced a series of outbreaks of nosocomial severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) infections in 2003. Two months after the final outbreak, we recruited 658 employees from the hospital that suffered the first and most severe SARS infections to help us investigate epidemiological and genetic factors associated with the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV). SARS-CoV infections were detected b...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Sympathetic ophthalmia (SO) is a classic example of autoimmune disease where human leucocyte antigen (HLA) genomic associations could provide further understanding of mechanisms of disease. This study sought to assess HLA genetic polymorphism in British and Irish patients with SO, and to assess whether HLA gene variants are associated with clinical phenotype or disease severity....

BACKGROUND HFE mutations are associated with hereditary haemochromatosis. However, a simple method capable of demonstrating the cis/trans arrangement of alleles is lacking, and linkage disequilibrium between HFE alleles and classic HLA loci is unknown. These are important issues as the pathogenic role of the mutations is not known. AIMS To develop a simple method of genotyping HFE mutations s...