NO EVIDENCE FOR AN ASSOCIATION BETWEEN A VARIANT OF THE MAST-CELL CHYMASE GENE AND ATOPIC-DERMATITIS BASED ON CASE-CONTROL AND HAPLOTYPE-RELATIVE-RISK ANALYSES

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic relapsing dermatitis which belongs to the group of atopy-related diseases as well as asthma and allergic rhinitis. As a probable genetic risk which may contribute to the orga n specificity of AD, an association between AD and a genetic variant o f the gene encoding mast cell chymase (MCC), which has chymotrypsin-li ke specificity and is abundant in skin mast cells, has been reported i n a Japanese population. We tried to confirm the role of this polymorp hism in the development of AD in a Japanese population, A case-control analysis using 100 AD patients and 101 controls did not show a signif icant difference in the frequency of the BE genotype between the patie nt and control groups (odds ratio 1.12, p = 0.81), The haplotype relat ive-risk analysis using 69 patient-parents trios did not suggest an as sociation (chi(2) = 0.177, p = 0.92). Thus, we failed to confirm the a ssociation between the polymorphism in the MCC gene and AD in the Japa nese population.