Vitiligo is an acquired hypomelanotic skin disorder characterised by circumscribed depigmented macules resulting from the loss of functional melanocytes from the cutaneous epidermis and autoimmunity has been suggested to play a role in th e pathogenesis of the disease. Recently, an insertion/deletion (I/D) polymorphis m of a 287-base pair repetitive sequence in intron 16 of the angiotensin conver ting enzyme (ACE) gene has been associated with autoimmune disease and with the development of vitiligo. In this study, the distribution of ACE gene I/D genotyp es was investigated in a population of 106 English patients with generalised (no n-segmental) vitiligo and 174 ethnically matched healthy controls using a restriction fragment length polymorphism-polymerase chain reaction genotyping method. No significant difference in the frequ encies of II, ID and DD genotypes was detected between vitiligo patients and con trol subjects (P=0.35). The same result was evident for the genotype distributio n in vitiligo patients with an autoimmune disease and for those without when com pared with controls (P=0.33 and P=0.53, respectively). In addition, the results indicated that the D allele was not significantly over-represented in the group of patients with vitiligo compared with controls (P=0.42) and that this was als o the case for patients with and without associated autoimmunity (P=0.40 and P=0 .62, respectively).
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