Objective: To provide a quantitative summary in estimating the association between polymorphisms of 2 loci of FokI and TaqI in vitamin D receptor gene and susceptibility to tuberculosis by means of meta-analysis.
Methods: Databases CNKI, CBM, WanFang DATA, MEDLINE and PubMed were searched using "VDR", "polymorphisms" or "alleles", in combination with "tuberculosis", and a manual search of citations from relevant original studies and literature was also performed between January 1980 and November 2007. RevMan 4.2 was applied in the process of analyzing the data of 14 case-control studies.
Results: The summary ORs for studies with polymorphisms of FokI, TaqI loci of the VDR gene were 1.12 (95%CI: 0.98 - 1.28) in Ff vs FF, 1.66 (95%CI: 1.12 - 2.46) in ff vs FF, 0.97 (95%CI: 0.82 - 1.14) in Tt vs TT, 1.27 (95%CI: 0.96 - 1.69) in tt vs TT. The fail-safe number was 109.69 for FokI and 75.24 for TaqI. The analysis result was reliable.
Conclusion: Polymorphisms at FokI loci (VDR-ff) showed statistically significant association between the VDR variants and susceptibility to tuberculosis, and variant in the TaqI locus failed to show statistically significant association.