Our studies confirmed an association of the STAT4 C (rs7582694) variant with the development of SLE and occurrence of some clinical manifestations of the disease.
The results of our study demonstrated that STAT4 rs7582694 SNP was significantly associated with SLE, and these results were in accordance with previous studies.
We decided to investigate the association of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the IRF7/KIAA1542 region (rs4963128, rs2246614, and rs702966) and in STAT4 (rs7574865 and rs7582694) with SLE disease in a Northern Han Chinese population of 748 patients and 750 healthy controls.
The risk allele of the SNP rs7582694 in STAT4 correlated to production of anti-dsDNA (double-stranded DNA) antibodies and displayed a multiplicatively increased, 1.82-fold risk of SLE with two independent risk alleles of the IRF5 (interferon regulatory factor 5) gene.