CARD15 polymorphisms in Behçet's disease

Background: Behcet's disease (BD) is a chronic multi‐system inflammatory disorder of unknown aetiology, which shares many features of the inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs). CARD15 has recently been identified as the first susceptibility gene in Crohn's disease (CD).Objective: Given certain clinical and pathological similarities between CD and BD, and recent evidence of linkage of BD to the CARD15 genomic region, the aim of this study was to investigate the role of CARD15 variants in determining susceptibility to BD.Methods: We studied 374 BD patients from three ethnically homogeneous cohorts (white English, Turkish, and Middle Eastern Arabs of Palestinian and Jordanian descent). Mutation detection of CARD15 was performed by direct sequencing in a subset of patients from each group and the identified variants were genotyped in the complete cohorts. Case–control analyses were carried out with additional stratification by the BD‐associated allele, HLA‐B*51.Results: Mutation detection identified six previous...