Do IL-4 intron 3 VNTR and IL-6 (-174) G/C variants reflect ethnic variation? A comparative study between the global and North Indian populations.

Variations in the production and activity of cytokines have been reported by several investigators which influence the susceptibility and/or resistance to various infectious agents and cancer. Differences in the cytokine production between individuals are often caused by single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the promoter or coding regions of cytokine genes. Although the SNP cytokine gene variations are basically mutations, they are designated as polymorphisms, because these changes do not modify the alleles to rare or abnormal variants. The two important cytokine genes IL-4 and IL-6 of 343 unrelated healthy individuals from North India were compared with the published polymorphism of other populations. It was seen that our population differs from South Indian population as well as from other Caucasian populations except, Taiwanese population at IL-4 locus and Spanish and Polish population at the IL-6 gene locus. This study may be helpful for predicting clinical outcome of various infectious and immunoregulated disorders as well as explore for risk alleles for various cancers.