Hyesun Lee

A recent study in the North American White population has documented the association of a common STAT4 haplotype (tagged by rs7574865) with risk for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and systemic lupus erythematosus. To replicate this finding in the Korean population, we performed a case-control association study. We genotyped 67 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within the STAT1 and STAT4 regions in 1123 Korean patients with RA and 1008 ethnicity-matched controls. The most significant four risk SN

OBJECTIVE: Recently, Swedish members of the Epidemiological Investigation of Rheumatoid Arthritis (EIRA) provided evidence that smoking may trigger RA-specific immune reactions to citrullinated protein in carriers of HLA-DR shared epitope alleles. In an effort to confirm this interaction between smoking and shared epitope alleles, we performed a case-only analysis of 3 North American RA cohorts. METHODS: A total of 2,476 white patients with RA were studied, 1,105 from the North American Rheumato

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the association of susceptibility and protective HLA-DRB1 alleles with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and its clinical markers in an Asian population. METHODS: All RA patients (n = 574) and control subjects (n = 392) were Korean. HLA-DRB1 typing and further subtyping of all alleles was performed by polymerase chain reaction, sequence-specific oligonucleotide probe hybridization, and direct DNA sequencing analysis. We used a relative predispositional effects (RPEs) method and

OBJECTIVE: Recent studies have identified a number of novel rheumatoid arthritis (RA) susceptibility loci in Caucasian populations. The aim of this study was to determine whether the genetic variants at 4q27, 6q23, CCL21, TRAF1/C5, and CD40 identified in Caucasians are also associated with RA in a Korean case-control collection. We also comprehensively evaluated the genetic variation within PTPN22, a well-established autoimmune disease-associated gene. METHODS: We designed an experiment to thoro

Recent evidence suggests that additional risk loci for RA are present in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), independent of the class II HLA-DRB1 locus. We have now tested a total of 1,769 SNPs across 7.5Mb of the MHC located from 6p22.2 (26.03 Mb) to 6p21.32 (33.59 Mb) derived from the Illumina 550K Beadchip (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA). For an initial analysis in the whole dataset (869 RA CCP + cases, 1,193 controls), the strongest association signal was observed in markers near the

In an effort to discover non-HLA genes affecting susceptibility to type 1 diabetes (T1D), we have investigated the association of polymorphisms in STAT4, an important signaling molecule of IL-12, gammaIFN, and IL-23, in a sample of 389 T1D patients and 152 nondiabetic controls in Korea. Four SNPs on chromosome 2q, which were recently found to be associated with rheumatoid arthritis, were examined for association and linkage disequilibrium. We found that neither alleles or genotypes among all fou

Objective. Although two recent randomized placebo-controlled trials of rituximab (RTX) failed to demonstrate efficacy in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), clinicians continue to use off-label RTX for cases refractory to current treatments. We evaluated the effectiveness and safety of rituximab for patients with refractory SLE in Korea. Methods. We retrospectively analyzed multicenter patients treated with RTX in Korea. Results. 39 SLE patients treated with RTX were included in the following ma

INTRODUCTION: Although it has been suggested that rare coding variants could explain the substantial missing heritability, very few sequencing studies have been performed in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We aimed to identify novel functional variants with rare to low frequency using targeted exon sequencing of RA in Korea. METHODS: We analyzed targeted exon sequencing data of 398 genes selected from a multifaceted approach in Korean RA patients (n = 1,217) and controls (n = 717). We conducted a sin

BACKGROUND: variant rs35705950 is the common and most significant risk variant for rheumatoid arthritis-interstitial lung disease (RA-ILD) in Western populations. However, little is known about its significant association with RA-ILD in Asian populations. We here investigate the association of rs35705950 with Korean patients with RA-ILD. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study, we genotyped rs35705950 in 2444 patients with RA. Among them, 683 patients with RA who have chest CT were divided into R

Instances of tuberculosis were treated successfully in our AS patients, even when given concomitantly with TNF inhibitors. We suggest that early resumption of TNF inhibitors in AS patients could be safe under effective coverage of tuberculosis.

BACKGROUND: Considerable amount of evidences in the Caucasians have suggested the association of a missense single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the protein tyrosine phosphatase non-receptor type 22 (PTPN22) gene (rs2476601) with several autoimmune diseases including autoimmune thyroid diseases (AITD) and type 1 diabetes (T1D). As the SNP was reported to be non-polymorphic in Asians, we attempt to explore an association of PTPN22 without restricting to the rs2476601 with AITD or T1D in Korean

Recent advances in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) genetics in Asian populations have been achieved by genome-wide association studies (GWASs) and following replication studies, which expanded the genetic information about shared or population-specific risk genes between ethnic groups. Meta-analyses and multi-ethnic replication studies may be possible approaches that could demonstrate stronger or more suggestive evidence for multiple variants for SLE. In addition to the susceptibility of SLE

Abstract Aim Bone erosion is a major problem worsening quality of rheumatoid arthritis ( RA ) patients’ lives. However, causal factors responsible for bone erosion in RA have remained unclear. We aimed to examine genetic variants conferring bone erosion in RA using a Korean genome‐wide association study ( GWAS ) and to search for possible biological mechanisms underlying the development of bone erosion. Method We obtained genome‐wide single nucleotide polymorphism ( SNP ) data for 711 Korean RA

The aim of our study was to develop a Korean rheumatic diseases-screening questionnaire. The questionnaire was constructed based on American College of Rheumatology criteria for rheumatic diseases and a connective tissue diseases screening questionnaire. Two groups of patients were selected and completed the questionnaire: (i) those with osteoarthritis (n=46), rheumatoid arthritis (n=52), systemic lupus erythematosus (n=50), scleroderma (n=8), polymyositis or dermatomyositis (n=7), Sjogren's dis