HLA antigens in Guillain-Barré syndrome

We compared Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) cases reported from cities in the United States in 1976-1977 with spouse or associate controls to detect possible HLA associations. HLA-A11 was somewhat less common among 92 cases than among 100 controls (p = 0.04). The 38 patients and 42 controls vaccinated against A/NJ/76 differed slightly in overall distribution of B locus antigens (p = 0.06), but the individual HLA-B antigen associations were more easily explained by chance. The 54 unvaccinated cases showed no apparent relation to HLA type. These findings should encourage further immunogenetic study of etiologically related GBS cases.