Common variants of and contribute to susceptibility to hand osteoarthritis and related pain.

To examine the relationship of the and genes with hand osteoarthritis (HOA) susceptibility risk, clinical severity and pain. A total of 3740 subjects comprising 1180 participants with HOA and 2560 controls were enrolled. Genetic association was evaluated at both single marker and haplotype levels using PLINK. Two significant hits, single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs4721 from and SNP rs3745368 from , were identified as being related to an increased risk of HOA. Significant associations were obtained for SNP rs3745368 with Kellgren-Lawrence grade in HOA patients and SNP rs4721 with pain analog scales of HOA patients. The authors' results indicate that and affect HOA risk and are associated with clinical features and severity in patients with HOA.