Crohn's disease susceptibility variants in Colombian tuberculosis patients.

BACKGROUND

The molecular basis of genetic predisposition to pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) in adults remains largely elusive. A chronic granulomatous inflammatory reaction is one of the main characteristics of the immune response to TB; however, a similar reaction is observed in other diseases, such as Crohn's disease.

OBJECTIVE

To assess the association of genetic polymorphisms previously associated with Crohn's disease and PTB in a Colombian population of PTB patients and controls.

DESIGN

A case-control study was performed among 500 newly diagnosed PTB patients and 320 healthy control subjects. Thirty-one single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) identified in a previous meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies of Crohn's disease were used for genotyping using MassARRAY technology.

RESULTS

In this study, we identified an association with borderline significance (P = 0.0009433 and P = 0.029 after multiple testing by Bonferroni's correction) of SNP rs10995271 with PTB. SNP rs10995271 is in linkage disequilibrium with SNPs belonging to the zinc finger protein (ZNF365) gene.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results suggest that human PTB shares a genetic basis with Crohn's disease, and that SNPs in the ZNF365 gene would have a role in the occurrence of chronic granulomatous inflammatory reaction in TB as well as Crohn's disease.