Taken together the fact that a high fraction of the differentially methylated regions between the CPA and control groups were localized in either known regulatory regions or regions that were independently shown to contain a high concentration of regulatory chromatin marks, DNase hypersensitivity and transcription factors, supports the hypothesis that they are involved in differential regulation of cytokine expression between CPA and control groups. Indeed, several methylated regions located within the cytokine loci were found to significantly correlate with cytokine levels in plasma.
