TY - JOUR T1 - VNTR polymorphism in IL1RN gene in COPD and bronchial astma in Bulgarian population JF - European Respiratory Journal JO - Eur Respir J VL - 42 IS - Suppl 57 SP - P550 AU - Dimo Dimov AU - Mateusz Kurzawski AU - Tanya Tacheva AU - Vanya Ilieva AU - Atanas Koychev AU - Gospodika Prakova AU - Vasil Dimitrov AU - Marek Drozdzik AU - Tatyana Vlaykova Y1 - 2013/09/01 UR - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/42/Suppl_57/P550.abstract N2 - COPD and Bronchial asthma (BA) are two of the most common chronic lung diseases. Both of them are multifactorial and are driven by abnormal inflammatory reactions. Although generally with different profile of inflammatory cells and mediators implicated, the inflammatory processes of both diseases in some cases are quite overlapping: thus, the pro-inflammatory cytokines TNF-α, IL-1β and IL-6 have been found in lung in individuals with both asthma and COPD.The natural anti-inflammatory agent IL-1Ra is encoded by IL1RN, which have a functional penta-allelic VNTR polymorphism in intron 2. It consists of 2 to 6 repeats of an 86-bp-long sequence, as allele 2 (2 repeats) is associated with higher IL-1Ra expression. In the current study we aimed to elucidate whether the IL1RN polymorphism is associated with the development of COPD and BA by conducting case-control studies with 161 COPD patients, 47 BA patients and 170 controls.We did not observe significant differences in genotype and allele frequencies of IL1RN polymorphism between controls and patients with COPD and BA. Interestingly, the rare allele 3 (5 repeats) and allele 4 (3 repeats) were not detected in BA, whereas the allele 3 was detected in controls (2.9%) and COPD (3.4%) and allele 4- only in controls (0.3%). Thus, the carriers of IL1RN allele 3 containing genotypes appeared to have 7.09-fold lower risk for BA than those homozygous of the most common allele 1 (4 repeats) (p=0.033) and allele 3 turned out to have a protective role for BA (OR=0.090, p=0.002). Based on the results of the current study we suggest that VNTR polymorphism of IL1RN gene does not affect the risk for COPD, but it may participate in predisposition to Bronchial asthma. ER -