Several genetic studies have assessed the association between polymorphisms in killer immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIR) genes and susceptibility of individuals to ankylosing spondylitis (AS), but the findings have been inconclusive and incongruous.
Our results suggest that the AS patients present more activating and less inhibitory KIR genes with combination of their HLA ligands than healthy controls.
However, we show that the contribution of the KIR genes to AS susceptibility extends beyond the association with individual KIRs, with an imbalance between activating and inhibitory KIR genes seeming to influence the susceptibility to AS.
The authors analyzed the frequency of 16 KIR genes in Koreans with either AS (110 patients, all HLA-B27-positive) or BD (86 patients), using polymerase chain reaction sequence-specific oligonucleotide probing.
In this study, the possible association of KIR genes, their known HLA ligands and compound KIR/HLA genotypes with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) was assessed.
The present study was performed to investigate whether the polymorphism of KIR genes and HLA ligands associates with the susceptibility of ankylosing spondylitis (AS).
Thus, the present study was undertaken to determine the association of the polymorphisms KIRs gene and HLA-C alleles with the susceptibility to ankylosing spondylitis (AS) by means of polymerase chain reaction/sequence-specific primers for genotyping KIRs from genomic DNA of 119 patients with AS together with 128 healthy donors as a control group.