Hla-drb Gene Arteritis Series Study

Aortoarteritis is a chronic, idiopathic, inflammatory disease that affects mainly aorta and its primary branches, which lead to artery stenosis and dilatation at various degrees. Its etiology and pathogenesis have not yet been fully elucidated, but it has been recognized that genetic and infectious factors may play a role in the pathogenesis. HLA genes play a key role in immune-response to heterogenetic and allogeneic antigens in the inflammatory tissues. It is well known that HLA genes are highly polymorphic and that the allele distribution is quite different in each ethnic group. It is also well recognized that HLA alleles or polymorphism of genes in the HLA region are associated with many immune disease, mainly with autoimmune diseases.In recent years many studies have shown that the frequencies of some HLA alleles were higher in patients of aortoarteritis than that of normal control which meant that there are some relationship between the HLA system and this disease. Some studies showed that there was relationship between various HLA gene and aortoarteritis whereas in the population of Chinese Han there was no such study on such relationship has reported. Therefore, it is important to the discovery of the mechanism of aortoarteritis by investigating the relationship between the HLA and the disease.The aim of the present study is to solve the following problems:1. To investigate the role of HLA-DRB and its upstream regulatory region in the...