“…Many candidate genes, including IL-6 (Broekhuizen et al, 2005;Danilko et al, 2007;Córdoba-Lanús et al, 2008;He et al, 2009), IL-8 (Shen et al, 2008, tumor necrosis factor (Küçükaycan et al, 2002), disintegrin and metalloprotease 33 (Sadeghnejad et al, 2009;Wang et al, 2009;Xiao et al, 2011), and beta 2-adrenoceptor (Hegab et al, 2004;Matheson et al, 2006) have been reported to be involved in COPD susceptibility. IL-6 is a potential mediator of inflammation in COPD, and has been shown to be increased in serum, exhaled breath condensate, and sputum during stable conditions and exacerbation, predicting a faster decline in forced expiratory volume in one second (Agustı et al, 2003;Donaldson et al, 2005;He et al, 2009).…”