Abstracts

RATIONALE: MTLE with HS is widely accepted as one of the medically intractable epilesies which may be remediable by surgery.Although the pathogenesis of this clinical entity is still remains to be obscure, presence of mainly similar early childhood events (ie.febrile seizures)in the history raises the question of genetic contribution. This study was performed to investigate if there is an association between HLA complex of chromozome 6 and MTLE with HS. METHODS: Sixty patients with MTLE-HS were ascertained from epilepsy surgery program of Cerrahpasa School of medicine according to the clinical,EEG and imaging and also histopathological data in 35 who underwent surgery.The control group included 160 normal volunteered kidney donors. HLA-A,B,DR and DQ typing was performed by microlymphocytotoxic methods using Terasaki class I and class II tissue typing trace. RESULTS: Analysis of the results by ?2 revealed a significant difference between the patients and controls in HLA-DQ2 (p=0.00015,Odds Ratio=38.45), HLA-DR4 (p=0.0015, Odds Ratio=4.26) and HLA-B49 (p=0.02, Odds Ratio=39.45) alleles. The significantly high frequency of HLA-DQ2 was striking as this type of HLA was known to be very infrequent in Turkish population. CONCLUSIONS: The HLA loci that occur with increased frequency in many HLA associated conditions appear to serve as risk factors that increase susceptibility but are not essential for disease expression. The new findings from this HLA-association study may give rise to new insights in understanding the pathophysiology of HS which may be related to certain early childhood events and usually was found in close relationship with temporal lobe epilepsy. This study was supported by the Research Fund of The University of Istanbul.