| [Progress of studies on genetic susceptibility and susceptible genes of vitiligo]Vitiligo (OMIM: #193200) is a common autoimmune, frequent family clustering depigmentary disorder of the skin and hair that results from selective destruction of melanocytes. To date, the pathogenesis of vitiligo is unknown although there are many theories about its etiology, including self-destructive, biochemical, neural, autoimmune, and genetic hypotheses. In recent years, genetic contributions were revealed as the most important causative factor of vitiligo. Moreover, scientists holding the other hypotheses of vitiligo began to seek for supporting evidence from genetics and something were found. Because of the different genetic background, it is unlikely that all vitiligo patients share an inheritant basement between races or ethnic groups.Vitiligo is likely a heterogeneous disease with three susceptibility loci reported so far on chromosomes Ip31 (AIS1), 7q (AIS2), and 8p (AIS3) in Caucasian population. Because there is genetic heterogeneity among different vitiligo families, we dose not know whether this result is still true in other people, it is necessary to perform parallel test in other ethnic group. To investigate vitiligo susceptibility loci in Chinese population, we performed a genome-wide linkage analysis in Chinese families each with at least two affected siblings. |
