Abstract
As being the most debated polygenic disease, rheumatoid arthritis elicits great interest in the study of association with genetic factors in various ethnic and racial groups. Some of the HLA-DRB1 alleles are encoding shared epitope amino acids that are not conferring the same risk in various populations. Our study focuses on the evaluation of the distribution of HLA-DRB1 alleles in Romanian patients with early rheumatoid arthritis, along with controls by using PCRSSP method. HLA-DRB1 allele genotyping showed statistically significant differences given by a higher allele frequency for *04, *01 and *14. Also, in our study was observed a lower frequency for *03,*11,*13 and *15 HLA-DRB1 allele in patients group compared with controls, also a high frequency for *0404 and *0408 allele, in contrast with *0401 and *0402 which were significantly lower in patients than in controls. *0403, *0405 and *10 were not associated with early rheumatoid arthritis in our group diagnosed according with new classification criteria ACR/EULAR 2010. In present study we found a negative association of *0402, *11 and *13 with early rheumatoid arthritis. Results of our study are demonstrating the need of a continuous work of allele tracing and associating with rheumatoid arthritis, especially in cases early diagnosed in order to create sufficient premises for instituting a correct and possibly long term remissive treatment.