No evidence for multiple loci affecting rheumatoid arthritis risk on chromosome 6p21

The influence of certain alleles of the HLA-DRB1 locus on risk for rheumatoid arthritis has been well established through linkage and association studies. In addition, other loci in the HLA region on 6p21 may also affect an individual's risk profile. Here, we used a method to detect excess identity-by-descent sharing between affected sib pairs conditional on the observed genotypes at the hypothesized causal locus to test for the presence of additional arthritis risk loci in the linked region. We used affected sib pairs from two different studies. Because the test depends heavily on specifying accurate allele frequency estimates at the proposed causal locus, we used HLA-DRB1 allele frequency estimates from a large, population-based sample. We also discuss an alternate form of the test in which we could condition on parental genotypes, thereby eliminating the need for actual allele frequencies. The test showed no evidence for the presence of additional arthritis risk loci in the region in the British or North American samples made available for Genetic Analysis Workshop 15. Given the prior knowledge that there likely are arthritis risk loci other than HLA-DRB1 in the region, it appears the tests may have inadequate power to detect the presence of these loci in certain cases.