Study of the relationship between genetic variants of IL-18 and the occurrence of inflammatory bowel disease

A member of the Interleukin-1 superfamily of cytokines, interleukin-18 (IL-18) is essential to the etiology and progression of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a chronic inflammatory illness that affects the digestive system. This study investigated the possible association between two genetic variations, IL-18 rs187238 and IL-18 rs1946518, and IBD in Iraqi patients. We evaluated the association of two SNPs of the IL-18 gene at rs187238 and rs1946518 in 54 IBD patients with 19 Crohn’s disease (CD), 35 ulcerative colitis (UC), and 46 healthy controls using PCR-RFLP and PCR-AS techniques for detecting IL-18 rs187238 and IL-18 rs1946518, respectively, by extracting genomic DNA from blood samples. Our findings indicated no statistically significant variations between the IL-18 rs187238 genotypes and incidences of CD and UC (P = 0.189 and 0.59, respectively). However, the allele frequency showed a significant difference with CD (P = 0.049) but did not show a significant association with UC (P = 0.887). There was no significant association between the genotype and allele frequency of IL-18 rs1946518C/A and CD risk (P = 0.171 and 0.053, respectively). However, there was a significant association between the genotype and allele frequency of IL-18 rs1946518C/A and the risk of developing UC (P = 0.028 and 0.002, respectively). The study revealed statistically significant distinctions between the genetic and allelic frequencies of IL-18 rs1946518 and the probability of developing UC. Nonetheless, there were no significant distinctions between them and CD. According to the research, there were no major differences between IL-18 rs187238 and the two diseases. The frequency of the C allele is connected to CD.