Distribution of IL28B Genotypes in Iranian Patients with Chronic Hepatitis C and Healthy Individuals

Populations, respectively. a few studies reported that there is a mysterious association between the il28b polymorphism and the hepatitis c virus (hcv) genotype in patients with chronic hepatitis c but they did not give any reason for this phenomenon. objectives: the foremost purpose of this study was to compare the distribution of il28b genotypes between iranian healthy individuals and patients with chronic hepatitis c. patients and methods: in this study, 921 patients with chronic hepatitis c and 142 healthy individuals were included. the il28b rs12979860 and rs8099917 polymorphisms were genotyped using the polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (pcr-rflp) method. results: the frequency of il28b rs12979860 cc, ct, and tt genotypes in chronic hepatitis c patients was 38%, 48.8%, and 13.2% and in healthy individuals was 43.7%, 48.6%, and 7.7%. also, the frequency of il28b rs8099917 tt, gt, and gg genotypes in chronic hepatitis c patients was 58.3%, 37.1%, and 4.6% and in healthy individuals was 64.1%, 32.4% and 3.5%. the differences in the distribution of il28b rs12979860 and rs8099917 genotypes between patients with chronic hepatitis c and healthy individuals were not statistically significant. when we compared the distribution of il28b genotypes between the healthy group and the hcv infected patients by hcv genotype, we found 9.8% higher frequency of rs12979860 cc genotype in the healthy individuals than hcv genotype 1 infected patients (p = 0.03) however there was no significant difference in the distribution of rs12979860 genotypes between the healthy and hcv genotype 3 infected groups (p = 0.46). conclusions: it seems that the impact of il28b polymorphism on the spontaneous clearance of hcv genotype 1 is more prominent than hcv genotype 3 which results in the observation of higher rs12979860 c allele frequency in chronic hepatitis c patients with hcv genotype 3 than hcv genotype 1.