Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry

Objective：Major depression is known to have immunologic dysfunctions, the recent studies revealed that cytokines including IL-6 and IL-1β were increased in patients with major depression. Since molecular genetic methods have been progressed, this study was to investigate the relationship between major depression and immunologic aspects by analyzing polymorphism of IL-10 gene.

Method：92 patients with major depression were included and data of 146 normal controls obtained from the Catholic Hemopoietic Stem Cell Information Bank of Korea were used in this study. DNA was extracted from whole blood, thereafter amplified by polymerase chain reaction, and digested by MaeⅢ After that procedure, we obtained and assessed RFLP of two alleles, IL-10T and IL-10C. All data were analyzed by χ² test.

Results：1) There were no significant difference in genotype frequencies of IL-10*T/T, IL-10*T/C, and IL-10*C/C between major depression patients group and control group. 2) There were no significant difference in allelic frequencies of IL-10*T and IL-10*C between major depression patients group and control group.

Conclusion：We did not verified the differences in frequencies of IL-10*T/*IL-10*C gene between the major depression patients group and control group, respectively. But the results of this study do not declare that the IL-10 gene has no association with major depression. We do suggest that further systematic studies including various clinical variables should be conducted.

Keywords IL-10 gene;Polymorphism;Major depression.