Background: Graves' disease (GD) is one of the most common autoimmune thyroid disorders and has a striking characteristic of female preponderance.
Objective: The main objective of this study was to investigate whether IL12B gene polymorphisms were associated with either GD itself or with gender bias in GD.
Methods: GD patients (151 males, 97 females) and 211 healthy control subjects without antithyroid autoantibodies or a family history of autoimmune disorders were recruited for this study. The G/C polymorphism (rs6887695) of the IL12B gene was analyzed using the polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism, and the deletion and insertion polymorphism (rs41292470) in the IL12B promoter was detected after polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis-silver staining method.
Results: There was no significant difference between GD patients and normal subjects, and no differences in frequencies of genotypes or alleles of either polymorphism between male and female GD subjects.
Conclusion: We conclude that these IL12B gene polymorphisms were not associated with sex bias in GD and do not confer susceptibility to Graves' disease (GD) in the Chinese population.