A Nonsynonymous Functional Variant of the ITGAM Gene Is Not Involved in Biopsy-proven Giant Cell Arteritis

Abstract

To investigate whether a functional integrin alpha M (ITGAM) variant is involved in susceptibility to and clinical manifestations of giant cell arteritis (GCA). A Spanish cohort of 437 white patients with biopsy-proven GCA and 1388 healthy controls were genotyped using the TaqMan allele discrimination technology. No association was observed between ITGAM rs1143679 and GCA (p = 0.80, OR 0.97). Similarly, subphenotype analyses did not yield significant differences between the case subgroups and the control set or between GCA patients with or without the main specific features of GCA. Our results suggest that the ITGAM rs1143679 variant does not play an important role in the pathophysiology of GCA.