Collective effects of common SNPs and genetic risk prediction in type 1 diabetes

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a common autoimmune disease and may be related to multiple genetic and environmental risk factors. Previous genetic studies have focused on looking for individual polymorphic risk variants. Here we studied the overall levels of genetic diversity in T1D patients by making use of a previously published study including 1,865 cases and 2,828 reference samples with genotyping data for 500K common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). We determined the minor allele status of each SNP in the reference samples and calculated the total number of minor alleles or minor allele contents (MAC) of each individual. We found the average MAC of cases to be greater than that of the reference samples. By focusing on minor alleles with strong linkage to cases, we further identified a set of 112 SNPs that could predict 19.19% of cases. These results suggest that overall genetic variation over a threshold level may be a risk factor in T1D and provide a new genetic method for predicting the disorder.

http://ift.tt/2nHjw9N