Distribution of the CTLA-4 single nucleotide polymorphisms CT60G>A and +49A>G in psoriasis vulgaris patients and control individuals from a Polish Caucasian population.

Psoriasis vulgaris is a multifactorial disease with an autoimmune component, and T lymphocytes seem to be involved in its aetiology. CTLA-4 molecule is an important down-regulator of T-lymphocyte activation, and several polymorphisms of the CTLA-4 gene were found to be associated with some autoimmune diseases. We examined whether single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the CTLA-4 gene, CT60A>G and +49A>G, are associated with psoriasis vulgaris. Alleles of these two SNPs were determined by the polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism method. Both the CT60G>A and the +49A>G alleles and genotypes were distributed similarly in patients and controls. Although the two SNPs studied here in Poles were in linkage disequilibrium, all four possible two-locus haplotypes were found, one of them rare; of the remaining three, the haplotype +49G, CT60G was significantly (P = 0.019, OR = 0.58, 95%CI = 0.37-0.91) less frequent in the patient group with disease onset between the ages of 21 and 40 years than in controls and the other patient groups, whereas the frequencies of the other haplotypes were similar in patients and controls. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study on CTLA-4 CT60 allele frequencies in psoriasis.