Abstract
Purpose :
Behçet’s disease (BD) is a chronic, systemic, inflammatory disorder characterized by four major symptoms consisting of recurrent ocular symptoms, oral and genital ulcers, and skin lesions. Ocular involvement occurs in approximately 50-70% of patients with BD and repeated ocular attacks can cause blindness. In ARVO 2017, we reported that ocular attack of BD shows a significant seasonal variation in Japanese patients. Since it has been suggested that patient’s gender and genetic background affect the incidence of ocular symptoms, we assessed the seasonal pattern of ocular attack of BD by considering gender and two major genetic risk factors (HLA-B*51 and HLA-A*26).
Methods :
We enrolled a total of 174 Japanese patients with BD who were diagnosed and treated between March 1998 and September 2018 at the Uveitis Survey Clinic of Yokohama City University Hospital. The Roger’s test for cyclic variation was used to assess seasonal variation in ocular attack of BD. In this test, the null hypothesis is that the incidences are equally likely to be allocated in each of the months.
Results :
The gender differences and the presence or absence of HLA-B*51 in BD patients did not significantly affect the seasonality of ocular attack of BD. On the other hand, when the patients were stratified by HLA-A*26 status, the seasonal variation in ocular attack was significantly found only in HLA-A*26 positive patients but not in HLA-A*26 negative patients.
Conclusions :
We found that HLA-A*26 plays an important role in seasonal variation of ocular attack in BD. To confirm our findings, future validation studies with larger samples are needed.
This abstract was presented at the 2019 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Vancouver, Canada, April 28 - May 2, 2019.