Widespread non-additive and interaction effects within HLA loci modulate the risk of autoimmune diseases.

Lenz TL, Deutsch AJ, Han B, Hu X, Okada Y, Eyre S, Knapp M, Zhernakova A, Huizinga TW, Abecasis G, Becker J, Boeckxstaens GE, Chen WM, Franke A, Gladman DD, Gockel I, Gutierrez-Achury J, Martin J, Nair RP, Nöthen MM, Onengut-Gumuscu S, Rahman P, Rantapää-Dahlqvist S, Stuart PE, Tsoi LC, van Heel DA, Worthington J, Wouters MM, Klareskog L, Elder JT, Gregersen PK, Schumacher J, Rich SS, Wijmenga C, Sunyaev SR, de Bakker PI, Raychaudhuri S

Nat. Genet. 47 (9) 1085-1090 [2015-09-00; online 2015-08-10]

Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes confer substantial risk for autoimmune diseases on a log-additive scale. Here we speculated that differences in autoantigen-binding repertoires between a heterozygote's two expressed HLA variants might result in additional non-additive risk effects. We tested the non-additive disease contributions of classical HLA alleles in patients and matched controls for five common autoimmune diseases: rheumatoid arthritis (ncases = 5,337), type 1 diabetes (T1D; ncases = 5,567), psoriasis vulgaris (ncases = 3,089), idiopathic achalasia (ncases = 727) and celiac disease (ncases = 11,115). In four of the five diseases, we observed highly significant, non-additive dominance effects (rheumatoid arthritis, P = 2.5 × 10(-12); T1D, P = 2.4 × 10(-10); psoriasis, P = 5.9 × 10(-6); celiac disease, P = 1.2 × 10(-87)). In three of these diseases, the non-additive dominance effects were explained by interactions between specific classical HLA alleles (rheumatoid arthritis, P = 1.8 × 10(-3); T1D, P = 8.6 × 10(-27); celiac disease, P = 6.0 × 10(-100)). These interactions generally increased disease risk and explained moderate but significant fractions of phenotypic variance (rheumatoid arthritis, 1.4%; T1D, 4.0%; celiac disease, 4.1%) beyond a simple additive model.

NGI Uppsala (SNP&SEQ Technology Platform) [Service]

National Genomics Infrastructure [Service]

PubMed 26258845

DOI 10.1038/ng.3379

Crossref 10.1038/ng.3379

pii: ng.3379
pmc: PMC4552599
mid: NIHMS709472