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Genetic variants in a region on chromosome 6 are associated with risk of rheumatoid arthritis, report two studies online in Nature Genetics. Rheumatoid arthritis is the most common inflammatory arthritis, affecting up to 1% of the adult population, and these variants join a very short list of confirmed genetic factors that affect susceptibility to the disease.
Robert Plenge and colleagues carried out a genome-wide association study of individuals with rheumatoid arthritis, identifying a variant on chromosome 6, which was very close to a different variant on chromosome 6 identified in previous studies. They show that these variants probably independently contribute to risk of the disease. In a separate study, Jane Worthington and colleagues attempted to replicate all variants identified in a recent comprehensive report, and found that the one on chromosome 6 was unequivocally replicated. Although these variants are not located in a gene, the authors suggest that a gene some distance from them (TNFAIP3) is a plausible candidate to explain the effects of these markers, given its involvement in inflammatory processes. Author contacts: Robert Plenge (Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA)
E-mail: rplenge@partners.org Jane Worthington (University of Manchester, UK)
E-mail: jane.worthington@manchester.ac.uk Abstracts available online:
Paper 1.
Paper 2. (C) Nature Genetics press release.
Message posted by: Trevor M. D'Souza
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