الفهرس 
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Abstract
Asthma is a chronic pulmonary disorder characterized by air way inflammation and bronchial hypereactivity, and is responsible for a significant proportion of school day losses in children. The etiology of asthma is complex and is influenced by genetic and environmental factors.
IL-18 is an important cytokine for initiating and perpetuating the catabolic and inflammatory response in allegic asthma. A number of SNPs that influence IL-18 production are found in the gene promoter region.
Interleukin-18 gene polymorphism was reported to be associated with asthma severity and higher serum IL-18 levels. In addition, polymorphisms of the gene have been associated with allergic asthma and airway hyper-responsiveness (AHR) (Imoaoka et al., 2011b ).
The aim of this study was to investigate the association of IL-18 -105 C/A promoter polymorphism with asthma and whether this polymorphism influenced the severity of asthma in affected children.
A prospective randomized case-control study was carried out at the inpatient and outpatient clinic of Zagazig University Children Hospital. 120 children participated in this study, 60 asthmatics children (28 males and 32 females) subdivided into four groups according to different degrees of asthma severity, and 60 apparently age and sex matched healthy control subjects (30 males and 30 females). Age of both groups ranged from 2-16 years old.
All patients included in the study were subjected to detailed clinical evaluation including history, assessment of asthma severity, physical examination and pulmonary function test performed for children ≥ 5 years.
All subjects were subjected to the following: Genomic DNA extraction and analysis for IL-18105 C/A polymorphism using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) followed by restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis
In the present study, the genotype analysis of patients and controls revealed that there is statistical significance difference between cases and control in IL-18-105 C/A genotype distribution. there are statistical significant increase of genotype AA and AC in cases than control. There are no statistical significant relations between AA and CA genotypes and age, sex or residence of the cases group. Also, there is a significant increase of cases with +ve than cases with
–ve family history in AA genotype. also +ve family history show higher risk in AA genotype than AC genotype. There is no statistical significant difference between cases with AA genotype and cases with AC genotype in symptoms, severity of disease, seasonal variation of disease, diurnal variation of disease.