Variation at DENND1B and Asthma on the Island of Tristan da Cunha

A high prevalence of asthma has been documented among the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, an isolated island in the South Atlantic. The population derives from just 28 founders. We performed lung function testing, including methacholine inhalation challenge, allergen skin prick testing, and collected DNA from essentially all of the current island population (269 individuals), and genotyped a panel of 43 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) reported as associated with asthma and atopy. We carried out a mixed-model association analysis using the known pedigree. There were 96 individuals diagnosed as asthmatic (36%), and heritability estimates were similar to those from nonisolated population samples (multifactorial threshold model, h2 = 48%). The first component from a genetic principal components analysis using the entire SNP panel was nonlinearly associated with asthma, with the maximum risk to those intermediate to reference (Human Genome Diversity Project) European and African samples means. The single most strongly associated SNP was rs2786098 (p = 5.5 × 10-5), known to regulate the gene DENND1B. This explained approximately one-third of the trait heritability, with an allelic odds ratio for the A allele of 2.6. Among A/A carriers, 10 out of 12 individuals were asthmatic. The rs2786098*A variant was initially reported to decrease the risk of childhood (atopic) asthma in European but slightly increase the risk in African-descended populations, and does significantly alter Th2 cell function. Despite an absence of overall association with this variant in recent asthma genome wide association studies meta-analyses, an effect may exist on the particular genetic background of the Tristan da Cunha population.