Association Between -592 C/A Polymorphism of Interleukin-10 Gene and Diabetic Nephropathy in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients.

Objective: To establish the association between -592 C/A polymorphism of interleukin (IL)-10 gene and Diabetic Nephropathy (DNP) in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) patients.

Study design: Comparative observational study. Place and Duration of the Study: Department of Nephrology (in collaboration with Biochemistry and Advanced Research Centre for Biomedical Sciences (ARCB)), Mayo Hospital and King Edward Medical University, Lahore, Pakistan, from January to December 2021.

Methodology: The study included 282 patients with T2DM for ≥5 years, and aged ≥40 years. Patients with and without DNP were placed in Group A and B (n = 141 in each group), respectively. After drawing samples, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was first extracted from whole blood, then amplified via specific primers, and finally genotyped through the polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR - RFLP) method. Median and interquartile range (IQR) were used to describe the skewed data and frequencies were used for categorical data. Mann-Whitney U test was used for comparison of data groups. Chi-square test was used to establish an association.

Results: The median age of patients was 50.0 (12) years in Group A and 54.0 (11) years in Group B. Male-to-female distribution was 39 (27.7%) / 102 (72.3%) in Group A and 49 (34.8%) / 92 (65.2%) in Group B. The -592 C/A polymorphism of IL-10 genes was found more frequently in Group A 72 (51.0%) than Group B 63 (44.7%) without statistical significance (p = 0.283).

Conclusion: The current study showed that the presence of single nucleotide C/A polymorphism at the -592 position of IL-10 gene in T2DM patients does not influence (increase / decrease) their susceptibility to develop DNP.

Key words: Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus, Diabetic Nephropathy, Interleukin-10, -592 C/A, Single nucleotide polymorphism.