Correlation between gene polymorphism of tumor necrosis factor and inflammatory bowel disease

Objective To investigate the gene polymorphism of tumor necrosis factor (TNF) in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) among the Han nation and its role in the pathogenesis of IBD. Methods Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) were used to analyze the gene polymorphism of TNFα and TNFβ in 131 cases of IBD. Results The genotype frequency and allelic frequency of TNFα-308 in ulcerative colitis (UC) patients (15.5% and 8.7% ) were significantly higher than those in control subjects (4.1% and 2.0% respectively, P 0.01 ). There was no significant difference of genotype frequency and allelic frequency of TNFα-308 between Crohn's disease (CD) patients and normal population, neither of TNFβ+252 between IBD (UC and CD) patients and normal controls . The polymorphism of TNFα-308 and TNFβ+252 loci did not correlate with age, gender, disease duration, activity and lesion site of IBD patients. Conclusions TNFα-308 allele may be related with UC susceptibility; TNFα-308 polymorphism was not involved in the pathogenesis of CD. No correlation was found between TNFβ+252 polymorphism and IBD.