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Research article2018Peer reviewedOpen access

Common genetic variation in the autoimmune regulator (AIRE) locus is associated with autoimmune Addison's disease in Sweden

Eriksson, Daniel; Bianchi, Matteo; Landegren, Nils; Dalin, Frida; Skov, Jakob; Hultin-Rosenberg, Lina; Mathioudaki, Argyri; Nordin, Jessika; Hallgren, Asa; Andersson, Goran; Tandre, Karolina; Dahlqvist, Solbritt Rantapaa; Soderkvist, Peter; Ronnblom, Lars; Hulting, Anna-Lena; Wahlberg, Jeanette; Dahlqvist, Per; Ekwall, Olov; Meadows, Jennifer R. S.; Lindblad-Toh, Kerstin;
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Abstract

Autoimmune Addison's disease (AAD) is the predominating cause of primary adrenal failure. Despite its high heritability, the rarity of disease has long made candidate-gene studies the only feasible methodology for genetic studies. Here we conducted a comprehensive reinvestigation of suggested AAD risk loci and more than 1800 candidate genes with associated regulatory elements in 479 patients with AAD and 2394 controls. Our analysis enabled us to replicate many risk variants, but several other previously suggested risk variants failed confirmation. By exploring the full set of 1800 candidate genes, we further identified common variation in the autoimmune regulator (AIRE) as a novel risk locus associated to sporadic AAD in our study. Our findings not only confirm that multiple loci are associated with disease risk, but also show to what extent the multiple risk loci jointly associate to AAD. In total, risk loci discovered to date only explain about 7% of variance in liability to AAD in our study population.

Published in

Scientific Reports
2018, Volume: 8, article number: 8395
Publisher: NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP

    UKÄ Subject classification

    Medical Genetics

    Publication identifier

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-26842-2

    Permanent link to this page (URI)

    https://res.slu.se/id/publ/95746