Phenotype and functions of NK cells are significantly altered in HIV/HCV co-infection

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Interferon-gamma (IFN-c) is a dimerized soluble cytokine which is critical to the defense against HCV infection as it can inhibit HCV replication in the replicon system. It has been proven that polymorphisms in some genes may influence the persistence of HCV infection, clinical outcome, HCV replication, and liver damage. METHODS: Family-based association designs offer a compromise between traditional linkage studies and case-control association studies. In these studies, association is assessed within families, and hence the confounding due to population heterogeneity can be eliminated. In our study 177 families have been recruited from The Upper, Middle, and Lower Egypt governments. These families include 323HCV patients as well as 347 non infected individuals. All were subjected to Routine clinical & laboratory investigations in addition to PCR HCV, HCV genotyping. Polymorphism of IFN-c (+874T/A, rs 62559044) was genotyped using ARM-PCR and confirmed using direct sequencing specific primers. RESULTS: Groups of our study were in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium for IFN-c (+874T/A, rs 62559044). The T of IFN-c (+874T) allele was associated with 2 folds increased risk for HCV patients as compared to non-infected exposed person (OR = 1.9597, 95% CI 1.5269–2.5152, z statistic 5.284, p < 0.0001). The distribution of INF-c polymorphism was 10.81% AA, 51.39% AT &37.77% TT in HCV infected patients while in HCV-negative patients the distribution was 35.73% AA, 52.17% AT& 12.1%TT CONCLUSIONS: The T allele of rs 62559044 SNP of +IFNc gene polymorphism may have a crucial role of susceptibility to HCV infection in Egyptian families. This research was funded by Science & Technology Development Foundation (STDF), Project NO.1784 (TC/2/ Health/2009/hep-1.3).