Atika Mansoor

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disorder of lungs and airways regardless of the development in disease treatment the number of affected individuals is increasing day by day all around the world. Though largely considered environmental, asthma is an interactive disease and is caused by interaction of both environmental and genetic factors. A number of genes are found to be associated with asthma but recently discovered ADAM33 is now considered candidate gene for asthma. Two ADAM33 genetic variants rs2787094 C/G and rs3918936 A/G were genotyped using PCR-RFLP in a case-control study design. The association of genotyped SNPs was statistically explored for asthma. Gender and age specific disease trends were also checked. Our results clearly showed a strong association between asthma susceptibility and ADAM33 rs2787094 C/G polymorphism while ADAM33 rs3918396 lacked significance in association. Both ADAM33 SNPs lacked age or gender based disease association. We report strong association of ADAM33 rs2787094 C/G polymorphism with asthma in local Pakistani population irrespective of age and gender. While a lack of disease association with ADAM33 rs3918396 SNP with our population is in accordance with other Asian populations.