TNF, TNF receptor type 1, and allograft inflammatory factor-1 gene polymorphisms in Japanese patients with type 1 diabetes

The human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class III region, located on chromosome 6p21, has been regarded as one of the susceptible loci for type I diabetes. Because it contains many genes related to inflammatory and immune responses, including tumor necrosis factor (TNF), lymphotoxin-alpha (LT-alpha), and allograft inflammatory factor I (AIF-1) genes, it is unclear which gene within the class III region is responsible for the susceptibility to the disease. We sequenced the AIF-1 gene region and detected three novel polymorphisms, all of which were diallelic and localized at introns. Then, we investigated AIF-1, TNF, and LT-alpha gene polymorphisms in 165 patients with type 1 diabetes, consisting of 90 patients with young-onset type 1 diabetes, 75 patients with adult-onset type I diabetes, and 200 control patients. We also analyzed TNF receptors type 1 (TNFR1) and type 2 (TNFR2) gene polymorphisms, located on chromosome 12p13 and 1p36, respectively. Although there were significant differences between type 1 diabetes patients and controls in the distributions of TNF promoter polymorphisms at position -1031 and -857, and LT-alpha gene NcoI polymorphism, none of them was independently associated with the disease after two-locus analysis with HLA class 11 alleles. We detected the significantly increased frequency of the -383C allele, located in the TNFR-1 promoter region, in both young-onset and adult-onset diabetes patients compared with controls. In addition, the -383C allele was found to be associated with higher expression of the TNFR1 gene than that of -383A allele in in vitro expression. These results suggest that the TNFR1 gene region might be a susceptible locus to type I diabetes in Japanese. (C) American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics, 2003. Published by Elsevier Science Inc.