DNA methylation-based subclassification of psoriasis in the Chinese Han population

Abstract

Psoriasis (Ps) is an inflammatory skin disease caused by genetic and environmental factors. Previous studies on DNA methylation (DNAm) found genetic markers that are closely associated with Ps, and evidence has shown that DNAm mediates genetic risk in Ps. In this study, Consensus Clustering was used to analyze DNAm data, and 114 Ps patients were divided into three subclassifications. Investigation of the clinical characteristics and copy number variations (CNVs) of DEFB4, IL22, and LCE3C in the three subclassifications revealed no significant differences in gender ratio and in Ps area and severity index (PASI) score. The proportion of late-onset (≥40 years) Ps patients was significantly higher in type I than in types II and III (P = 0.035). Type III contained the smallest proportion of smokers and the largest proportion of non-smoking Ps patients (P = 0.086). The CNVs of DEFB4 and LCE3C showed no significant differences but the CNV of IL22 significantly differed among the three subclassifications (P = 0.044). This study is the first to profile Ps subclassifications based on DNAm data in the Chinese Han population. These results are useful in the treatment and management of Ps from the molecular and genetic perspectives.

Keywords

psoriasis / DNA methylation / subclassification

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Acknowledgements

This project was mainly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81502713), Grants for Scientific Research of BSKY (No. XJ201634) from Anhui Medical University, and Key Program of Outstanding Talents of Anhui Province (No. gxyqZD2017028). We are grateful to all the participants involved in this study.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Fusheng Zhou, Changbing Shen, Yi-Hsiang Hsu, Jing Gao, Jinfa Dou, Randy Ko, Xiaodong Zheng, Liangdan Sun, Yong Cui, and Xuejun Zhang declare that there are no conflicts of interest in the study. All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all patients included in the study.

Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11684-017-0588-6 and is accessible for authorized users.

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