No evidence for an association between a variant of the mast cell chymase gene and atopic dermatitis based on case-control and haplotype-relative-risk analyses

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic relapsing dermatitis which belongs to the group of atopy-related diseases as well as asthma and allergic rhinitis. As a probable genetic risk which may contribute to the organ specificity of AD, an association between AD and a genetic variant of the gene encoding mast cell chymase (MCC), which has chymotrypsin-like specificity and is abundant in skin mast cells, has been reported in a Japanese population. We tried to confirm the role of this polymorphism in the development of AD in a Japanese population, A case-control analysis using 100 AD patients and 101 controls did not show a significant difference in the frequency of the BE genotype between the patient and control groups (odds ratio 1.12, p = 0.81), The haplotype relative-risk analysis using 69 patient-parents trios did not suggest an association (chi(2) = 0.177, p = 0.92). Thus, we failed to confirm the association between the polymorphism in the MCC gene and AD in the Japanese population.