Association between Interleukin-6 Gene Polymorphisms and Rheumatoid Arthritis in Chinese Han Population: A Case-Control Study and A Meta-analysis

The aim of this study was to investigate the possible association in the interleukin-6 (IL-6) gene with Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in Chinese Han population from Shandong Province. Target regions of IL-6 gene were amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and genotyped. A logistic regression analysis was performed to detect potential associations in our case-control sample, the odd ratio(OR) and 95% confidence intervals(CIs) were calculated. Furthermore, we systematically tracked all the published studies in the field and performed a meta-analysis for the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) under study. 256 RA patients and 331 healthy controls were recruited into the case-control study. We found allele frequencies of rs1800795, rs1800797 and rs1474347 in RA patients differ from control subjects (P = 0.016, 0.024, 0.020, respectively). Significant difference was observed in haplotype frequencies of GCCGCT between RA patients and controls (P = 0.0001, OR = 4.066, 95%CI = 1.891 ~ 8.746), while GGCGCT frequencies was found lower in RA than controls (P = 0.006, OR = 0.669, 95%CI = 0.501 ~ 0.894). The results of the meta-analysis showed association polymorphism within the IL-6 promoter with RA. These findings suggest that rare IL-6 gene polymorphisms may associate with RA susceptibility in Han Chinese populations; however further studies are needed to assess the validity of the association of IL-6 with RA.