Introduction: Systemic inflammation is associated with atrial fibrillation (AF) and inflammatory processes are involved in the pathophysiology of AF. We hypothesized that genetic polymorphisms, which determine the rate of inflammatory cytokines, are associated with increased risk of AF.
Materials and methods: We included 158 patients with AF and 188 healthy controls. All patients were genotyped for common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in selected inflammatory genes.
Results: A case-control analysis of the investigated SNPs (IL1A-889, TNF-308, IL1B-511, IL10-592, IL10-1082, IL18-137 and IL18-607) revealed no significant differences in the frequencies of genotypes between the AF patients and the healthy controls.