Editor,
I read the recent paper by Choi et al. [1] with a great interest. Coto-Segura et al. [2] concluded that “The APOE-epsilon4 allele could be a risk factor for developing a severe form of psoriasis.” Indeed, the correlation between APOE-epsilon4 allele and medical disorder is widely studied. The report by Coto-Segura et al. seems to be a pioneer piece of work in dermatology on psoriasis. However, there are some points on the studies by Coto-Segura et al. to be concerned. First, although the number of cases and controls in this study seems statistically appropriate, the actual prevalence of a polymorphism might need more subjects, thousands of included cases, for verification. This is an important basic error in genome wide association case/control studies [5]. Second, the race and ethnic effect of the subjects is another point to be concerned for making a conclusion of the finding. The difference of APOE-epsilon4 allele distributions among different populations is confirmed in medical literature and this might lead to difference in its relationship to specific medical disorders. The good examples are those controversial reports on Alzheimer’s disease [1, 3, 4]. These points need clarification to strengthen the conclusion of the work.
References
Choi YH, Kim JH, Kim DK, Kim JW, Kim DK, Lee MS, Kim CH, Park SC (2003) Distributions of ACE and APOE polymorphisms and their relations with dementia status in Korean centenarians. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci 58(3):227–231
Coto-Segura P, Coto E, Alvarez V, Morales B, Soto-Sánchez J, Corao AI, Santos-Juanes J (2009) Apolipoprotein epsilon4 allele is associated with psoriasis severity. Arch Dermatol Res. 13 Nov [Epub ahead of print]
Kimura M, Matsushita S, Arai H, Matsui T, Yuzuriha T, Higuchi S (2000) No evidence of association between apolipoprotein E gene regulatory region polymorphism and Alzheimer’s disease in Japanese. J Neural Transm 107:1449–1456
Raygani AV, Zahrai M, Raygani AV, Doosti M, Javadi E, Rezaei M, Pourmotabbed T (2005) Association between apolipoprotein E polymorphism and Alzheimer disease in Tehran, Iran. Neurosci Lett 375:1–6
Sampson JN, Zhao H (2009) Genotyping and inflated type 1 error rate in genome wide association case/control studies. BMC Bioinf 10:68
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Wiwanitkit, V. Apolipoprotein epsilon4 allele and psoriasis severity. Arch Dermatol Res 302, 153 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00403-009-1016-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00403-009-1016-9