Genetic polymorphisms of TNFA and IL-1A and generalized aggressive periodontitis

Virulent bacteria could cause gingival fibroblasts apoptosis through lipopolysaccharide release during generalized aggressive periodontitis (GAgP) development and evolution. We showed that treatment with lipopolysaccharide (LPS, 1 μg/mL) for 30 days induced the decrease in the number of cultured rat gingival fibroblasts as compared to control group, which received no treatment. GAgP is considered to have also a genetic etiology, so the aim of our study was to evaluate if some polymorphisms of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNFA) and interleukin 1A (IL-1A) genes are associated with GAgP in a sample of Romanian population. We selected a group of 32 subjects (22 cases and 10 controls) for studying the TNFA (-857) polymorphism and 97 subjects (66 cases and 31 controls) for IL-1A (-889) polymorphism. The single nucleotide polymorphisms were genotyped by real-time polymerase chain reaction for all subjects. The genotype and allelic distribution tended to be equally between the cases and the controls group. Similar results were obtained for the dominant and recessive model. The difference between the two groups did not reach statistic significance for neither of the two studied polymorphisms [p=0.76 for TNFA (-857) and p=0.84 for IL-1A (-889)]. The data suggest that TNFA (-857) C/T and IL-1A (-889) C/T polymorphisms are not associated with susceptibility to GAgP in this Romanian population, potentially because of the small sample size. This is the first such study for Romanian northeastern population.