Hanyang Med Rev.
2005 May;25(2):13-20.
Genentics in Rheumatoid Arthritis
- Affiliations
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- 1Department of Internal Medicine, College of Medicine, Hanyang University, Korea. lhsberon@hanyang.ac.kr
Abstract
- The understanding of genetic factors contributed to the susceptibility or severity of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) might give new insights into the pathways involved in disease pathogenesis and lead to the identification of novel therapeutic targets. However, a lot of published case-control association studies could not demonstrate the conclusive results due to the lack of reproducibility, small sample size, poor study design, incorrect assumption, and ethnic diversity. Recently, several genome-wide scan using affected sibling pairs and following candidate gene approaches have been performed to unravel the complex association of rheumatoid arthritis with the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) gene region, non-HLA major histocompatibility region within chromosome 6, and the other chromosomes such as chromosome 1. This review summarizes the importance of genetic studies in RA, and the variable methods of genetic studies and their results.
