Recent studies have suggested that IL-18 ?607C/A and ?137G/C polymorphismsmay be associated with the risk of allergic disease;\nhowever, individually published results are inconclusive. Therefore, we performed ameta-analysis to clarify whether IL-18 ?607C/A\nand ?137G/C polymorphisms were associated with the risk of allergic disease. A total of 21 studies including 5,331 cases and 9,658\ncontrols were involved in this meta-analysis. In the overall analysis and the subgroup analysis according to ethnicity, we did not find\nsignificant association between IL-18 ?607C/A or ?137G/C polymorphism and the risk of allergic disease (all P > 0.05). However,\nin a stratified analysis by type of allergic disease, our results indicated that IL-18 ?607C/A polymorphism was associated with a\nsignificantly decreased risk of allergic asthma in heterozygous comparison and IL-18 ?137G/C was associated with a significantly\ndecreased risk of allergic dermatitis in recessive model and homozygous comparison. In the stratified analysis by source of control,\nIL-18?607C/A showed significantly reduced risk in population-based subgroup, and for IL-18 ?137G/C only significantly decreased\nrisk was found in the hospital-based subgroup. Our meta-analysis suggests that IL-18 ?607C/A and ?137G/C polymorphisms may\nbe protective factors for the risk of allergic asthma and allergic dermatitis, respectively.
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