Introduction: The aim of this study was to evaluate the methylation status of TNF-α and SOCS3 promoters in patients with BD and compare them with a healthy group.

Method: This was a case–control study, in which 47 subjects with BD and 61 individuals as the control participated. Blood samples were collected from all the participants. Then, PBMCs were isolated using the Ficoll method and methylation of considered sites was investigated using the qMS-PCR technique after DNA extraction by the rapid genomic DNA extraction method and its analysis with Nano-drop.

Results: The methylation and expression of TNF-α showed that the methylation level significantly declined in the patient in comparison with the healthy (p < 0.05). Moreover, the results on the mean expression showed that it significantly increased in the patient group, as compared with the healthy group (p < 0.05). In addition, the expression of the SOCS3 gene was not significantly different between the patients and healthy subjects while the level of SOCS3 methylation was significantly higher in the patient group than that in the healthy group (p < 0.05).

Discussion: The present study revealed that the gene expression of TNF-alpha increased in BD patients, suggesting that TNF-alpha likely has a role in the pathogenesis of BD.

简介：这项研究的目的是评估BD患者中TNF-α和SOCS3启动子的甲基化状态，并将其与健康组进行比较。

方法：这是一个病例对照研究，其中47名BD受试者和61名个体为对照。从所有参与者收集血液样本。然后，使用Ficoll方法分离PBMC，并通过快速基因组DNA提取方法进行DNA提取并通过Nano-drop分析后，使用qMS-PCR技术研究所考虑位点的甲基化。

结果：甲基化和TNF-α的表达表明，与健康人相比，患者的甲基化水平显着下降（p  <0.05）。而且，关于平均表达的结果表明，与健康组相比，患者组中的平均表达显着增加（p  ＜0.05）。另外，患者和健康受试者之间SOCS3基因的表达没有显着差异，而患者组中SOCS3甲基化的水平显着高于健康组（p  <0.05）。

讨论：本研究表明BD患者的TNF-α基因表达增加，提示TNF-α可能与BD的发病机制有关。