Abstract
The objective was to investigate the frequency of human leucocyte antigen (HLA)-E alleles in Egyptian women with and without recurrent miscarriage (RM) to evaluate their role on the maintenance of pregnancy. A case-control study was adopted. HLA-E gene polymorphism typing was carried out by restriction fragment length polymorphism for 108 women with RM and 120 fertile female controls. The frequency of HLA-E *0101 allele was higher in patients with RM and HLA-E*0103 allele was higher in fertile controls, and the difference was statistically significant (P = 0.003, P-c = 0.006). HLA-E*0101/0101 genotype was the most frequent genotype in patients (45.4%), followed by HLA-E*0101/0103 (44.4%) and finally HLA-E*0103/0103 genotype (10.2%). The difference in the frequency of HLA-E*0101/0101 homozygous genotype in patients with RM compared with that in the fertile controls was statistically significant (OR = 2.02, 95% CI = 1.13-3.62, P = 0.011, P-c = 0.033). We found an increased frequency of homozygosity for HLA-E*0101 in Egyptian women with RM. HLA-E*0101 homozygosity may thus be a risk factor for RM.