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Behçet's disease (BD) is widely known to be strongly associated with human leukocyte antigen (HLA) B51 in many different ethnic groups.Recently, HLA-B51 allele typing of Greek BD patients was performed to study the distribution of B*5101-B*5107 alleles in this Greek population, the B51 antigen strongly associated with BD was found to be predominantly encoded by allele B*5101.As it is now known that the B51 antigen can be encoded by 21 alleles, B*5101-B*5121, we performed HLA-B*51 allele genotyping among 58 Greek patients with BD.After serological HLA typing, typing of HLA-B*51 alleles was performed using the polymerase chain reaction-sequencing-based typing (PCR-SBT) method.The frequency of the B51 antigen was found to be significantly higher in the patient group as compared with the control group (75.9% of patients vs 22.0% of controls. In the genotyping of B51 alleles, 34 out of 44 B51-positive patients possessed B*5101, 13 out of the 44 carried B*5108.In contrast, all of the 9 B51-positive normal controls carried B*5101.This study revealed a strong association between Greeks with BD, both B*5101, B*5108, provided important insights into the molecular mechanism underlying the association between HLA status, this disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]