The research may strengthen researchers’ abilities to better predict a child’s risk for associated autoimmune diseases. Autoimmune diseases, eg type 1 diabetes, Crohn’s disease and juvenile idiopathic arthritis, collectively affect 1 in 12 persons in the Western hemisphere. They represent a significant cause of chronic disability.
“The results from this study enable us to better understand the genetic component of these diseases and how they are genetically related to each other, thereby explaining why different autoimmune disorders often run in the same family,” said Hakon Hakonarson, M.D., Ph.D.
The research encompassed 9 pediatric-onset autoimmune diseases (pAIDs): type 1 diabetes, celiac disease, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, common variable immunodeficiency, systemic lupus erythematosus, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, and ankylosing spondylitis. The study team compared genome-wide association study data from those diseases to data from pediatric-onset epilepsy, a non-autoimmune disease. In all, the study team analyzed data from over 5,000 unrelated pAID patients drawn from the CHOP pediatric network and from 36,000 healthy controls.
The 2 diseases with the highest heritability were type 1 diabetes (T1D) and juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). 2 forms of inflammatory bowel disease, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, had lower rates of heritability – in line with other research showing the influence of environmental factors such as gastrointestinal microorganisms in those diseases.
In general, pAIDs had stronger heritability than previously found in adult-onset autoimmune diseases. This makes biological sense, said Hakonarson, because children have had a shorter time than adults for environmental exposures to have an effect. Among disease pairs, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease had the strongest correlations, as did JIA and CVID.
“We envision that we may be able to develop new therapies that may help significant subsets of patients across multiple autoimmune diseases who share the same genetic variants that result in perturbations of normal biological functions and autoimmunity,” said Hakonarson, who added, “This is the foundation for precision medicine approaches.”  http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151009/ncomms9442/full/ncomms9442.html   http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-10/chop-rgh100715.php
Autoimmune disease prevalence and heritability estimates.
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