Association of Leukotrichia in Vitiligo and Asp148Glu Polymorphism of Apurinic/Apyrimidinic Endonuclease 1

BACKGROUND: Oxidative stress and increased DNA damage have been implicated in the etiopathogenesis of vitiligo. Oxidative DNA damage is mainly repaired by the base excision repair (BER) pathway. AIM: We sought to determine whether polymorphisms in DNA repair genes may have a role in the pathogenesis of vitiligo. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a study including 100 patients with vitiligo and age- and sex-matched 193 control subjects to examine the role of single-nucleotide polymorphisms of BER genes, human 8-oxoG DNA N-glycosylase 1 (codon 326), apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease 1 (APE1) (codon 148), and X-ray repair cross-complementing group 1 (codon 399) as risk factors for vitiligo. These polymorphisms were determined by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction and melting curve analysis. RESULTS: No significant association was observed between the variant alleles of studied genes and vitiligo. CONCLUSION: However, we showed that the presence of APE1 148Glu variant allele is associated with leukotrichia. This preliminary study suggests that APE1 (codon 148) polymorphism may play a role in vitiligo pathogenesis.