Genetic determinants of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in South Indian male smokers.

The development of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, upon exposure to tobacco smoke, is the cumulative effect of defects in several genes. With the aim of understanding the genetic structure that is characteristic of our patient population, we selected forty two single nucleotide polymorphisms of twenty genes based on previous studies and genotyped a total of 382 samples, which included 236 patients and 146 controls using Sequenom MassARRAY system. Allele frequencies of rs2276109 (MMP12) and rs1800925 (IL13) differed significantly between patients and controls (p = 0.