Evidence for polygenic susceptibility to multiple sclerosis--the shape of things to come.

ABSTRACT: It is well established that the risk of developing multiple sclerosis is substantially increased in the relatives of affected individuals and that most of this increase is genetically determined. The observed pattern of familial recurrence risk has long suggested that multiple variants are involved, but it has proven difficult to identify individual risk variants and little has been established about the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility. By using data from two independent genome-wide association studies (GWAS), we demonstrate that a substantial proportion of the thousands of variants that individually fail to show statistically significant evidence of association have allele frequencies in cases that are skewed away from the null distribution through the effects of multiple a

SUBMITTER: International Multiple Sclerosis Genetics Consortium (IMSGC) 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2850422 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature