Association analysis of Toll-like receptor 7 gene polymorphisms and Behçet's disease in Japanese patients

Action of Toll-like receptors (TLRs) is deeply associated with defense mechanisms of the innate and adaptive immune responses to microbial pathogens. There have been reports of genetic polymorphisms within the TLR7 gene being closely related to a variety of inflammatory and infectious diseases. Behçet's disease (BD) is an autoinflammatory disease, and the pathogenesis has yet to be fully discovered. We investigated whether polymorphisms of Toll-like receptor 7 (TLR7) are associated with BD by analyzing the frequency of eight single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within 200 Japanese BD patients and 102 randomized controls. We genotyped nine SNPs in the TLR7 gene and assessed the allele/genotype diversity between cases and controls for all SNPs. In all eight SNPs, statistically significant differences were not observed between cases and controls.