OBJECTIVES Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is the commonest rheumatic disease of childhood. Uveitis is the commonest eye complication of JIA, potentially leading to eye surgery and/or visual loss. JIA is a complex genetic trait with well-established HLA-DRB1 associations. The aim of this study was to investigate the involvement of HLA-DRB1 in JIA-associated uveitis. METHODS A set of 130 U...

OBJECTIVE To study HLA class II association in reactive arthritis. METHODS 63 patients with reactive arthritis and 46 with rheumatoid arthritis were included in the study. HLA-DR alleles were determined by using a sequence specific PCR method. Oligonucleotide hybridisation was used for definition of DRB1*04 subtypes and DQB1 alleles. HLA-B27 was determined by standard microcytotoxity test or ...

BACKGROUND To investigate the associations between HLA-DRB1 shared epitope (SE) alleles and rheumatoid arthritis in subsets of rheumatoid arthritis defined by autoantibodies in three Asian populations from Malaysia. METHODS 1,079 rheumatoid arthritis patients and 1,470 healthy controls were included in the study. Levels of antibodies to citrullinated proteins (ACPA) and rheumatoid factors wer...

BACKGROUND Kazakhstan has been inhabited by different populations, such as the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and others. Here we investigate allelic and haplotypic polymorphisms of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes at DRB1, DQA1 and DQB1 loci in the Kazakh ethnic group, and their genetic relationship between world populations. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS A total of 157 unrelated Kazakh ethnic in...

The aims of this study were to summarize results on the association of HLA-DRB1 with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in Asians and to determine if the shared epitope (SE) hypothesis could explain the meta-analysis results. Among the papers published between January 1987 and July 2006 on RA susceptibility in Asian-Mongoloid populations (Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Thai), 12 were selected for the me...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the distribution of HLA-DRB1 and HLA-DQB1 alleles and its correlation with IFN-γ, IL-2, IL-6, IL-10 in HPV16 infected women with advanced cervical carcinoma. METHODS We collected 137 blood samples of cervical carcinoma patients diagnosed by pathology as cervical cancer in stage IIb-IVb before the treatment, and we gathered 175 blood samples of healthy women living in the ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationship between the polymorphism of human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-DRB1 and the susceptibility and repellency of drug use combined with HIV infection in Chinese. METHODS A total of 213 unrelated healthy people, 41 HIV-infected drug users, 24 HIV-uninfected drug users, and 64 HIV-infected non-drug users were recruited. Their HLA-DRB1 allele frequencies were ana...

Introduction: Sequential lymphomas involving both classical Hodgkin Lymphoma (cHL) and Primary Mediastinal B-cell have been previously reported but initial diagnosis of cHL followed by a distinct Diffuse Large B-Cell (DLBCL) or vice versa is an extremely rare phenomenon. Multiple etiological factors are involved in lymphoma pathogenesis. The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) has studied ex...

OBJECTIVE To test whether HLA-DR alleles influence the production of particular autoantibodies in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients, we screened synovial proteins with sera of RA patients homozygous for different HLA-DR alleles by using 2D blots. We found that sera of RA patients homozygous for HLA-DRB1*0404 recognised a 100-kDa synovial protein identified as calpastatin. We studied B and T ce...

Population studies represent an integral part and link in understanding the complex chain of host-pathogen interactions, disease pathogenesis, and MHC gene polymorphisms. Genes of Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid populations have created a distinctive HLA genetic profile in the Venezuelan population. Our objective was to determine the predominant HLA class I and II alleles and haplotype freque...