Association of HLA-A*03/A*31 and HLA-A*24/A*31 Haplotypes with Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system with unknown etiology. Recent evidences suggest the HLA contribution to Multiple sclerosis (MS) pathogenicity as they may present neuropeptides to cytotoxic lymphocytes. We aimed to investigate the association of some related HLA-A alleles and haplotypes with MS and compare the results with other Universal reports to shed light on some aspects of this universally expanded disease. In this investigation, alleles were genotyped by polymerase chain reaction with sequence-specific primers (PCR-SSP) in 50 MS patients, and 50 unrelated healthy individuals. The analysis was carried out using SPSS V.19 statistical software. The results of this study showed a significant association of HLAA* 03 and HLA-A*24 alleles with MS (P 0.0001), but HLA-A*02 and other alleles did not show any significant association (P 0.05). However, other alleles were not significantly associated (P 0.05). Interestingly, in our study, the HLA-A*31 allele was often in combination with HLA-A*03 and HLA-A*24 as risk haplotypes in MS patients. In the present study, not only HLA-A*03 and HLA-A*24 were highly associated with the risk of MS susceptibility, but also their combinations with HLA-A*31 allele were more frequent in patients. Therefore, HLA-A*31 may be introduced as a new complementary risk factor in MS pathogenesis.