In this study, patients with an Iranian ancestry, were referred by the epilepsy clinic of the Mofid hospital, Shahid Beheshty University, Tehran, Iran, to our laboratory. All the patients were classified according to their histories, clinical examinations, and workups based on the last revised terminology and concepts published by the international league against epilepsy (ILAE) (
12). The written informed consent forms were signed by the parents. Extensive clinical data were collected and stored in a database. Para-clinical workups and genetic counseling were done.
34 probands, clinically diagnosed as one type of idiopathic refractory epilepsy (IRE) spectrum, were selected. All patients were tested for their multidrug resistance during their regular treatment of epilepsy. Refractory seizures were defined as “not response to treatment”. Furthermore, patients with IRE did not achieve immunity against seizures after being treated with 3 - 5 commonly used AEDs.
Although some of the patients only showed trivial responses to the broad spectrum of AEDs, such as topiramate, which share multiple mechanisms of antiepileptic actions, the control group that included 81 patients with symptomatic, idiopathic or sporadic form of febrile or afebrile seizures were treated using general AEDs.
DNA was extracted from blood samples using the commercial iNTRON G-spin genomic DNA extraction kit.
2.1. SCN1A SNPs Analysis
We selected two Tag SNPs, including 1067A > G (rs2298771) in exon 16 and intronic SNP, and rs7601520 A > G in intron 15 of SCN1A gene due to its high rate of heterozygosity within the general Iranian population (
13). In order to conduct the screening of the SCN1A gene, the SNPs that we designed were intronic primers and amplification refractory mutation system (ARMS) PCR primers by the Primer3 online software. These SNPs were amplified, analyzed by the ARMS-PCR and confirmed by direct sequencing. We used a tetra primer ARMS-PCR for the identification of the two SNPs in the SCN1A gene to evaluate the genotype of the samples (
Figure 1).
The illustration shows the PCR product of SCN1A-exon 16 and SNPs situations (a), sequencing primers (b), ARMS-PCR primer sequence (c,d) and primers set design for double checking of SNPS (e).
2.2. ABCB1 (MDR1) SNP Analysis
A coding SNP (cSNP), 3435C > T (rs1045642), in the ABCB1 gene was screened by a published PCR-RFLP method (
8). To ensure the accuracy of the PCR-RFLP and ARMS-PCR methods, parts of the samples (about 15%) were randomly rechecked by direct sequencing.
The final data association was assessed by statistical software SPSS, where 95% of the confidence interval calculated and P value < 0.05 were considered significant.