0000000000174551

AUTHOR

Margaret A. Pericak-vance

Power estimation for non-standardized multisite studies

A concern for researchers planning multisite studies is that scanner and T1-weighted sequence-related biases on regional volumes could overshadow true effects, especially for studies with a heterogeneous set of scanners and sequences. Current approaches attempt to harmonize data by standardizing hardware, pulse sequences, and protocols, or by calibrating across sites using phantom-based corrections to ensure the same raw image intensities. We propose to avoid harmonization and phantom-based correction entirely. We hypothesized that the bias of estimated regional volumes is scaled between sites due to the contrast and gradient distortion differences between scanners and sequences. Given this…

research product

Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have ena…

research product

REEP1 mutation spectrum and genotype/phenotype correlation in hereditary spastic paraplegia type 31.

Contains fulltext : 71291.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Mutations in the receptor expression enhancing protein 1 (REEP1) have recently been reported to cause autosomal dominant hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP) type SPG31. In a large collaborative effort, we screened a sample of 535 unrelated HSP patients for REEP1 mutations and copy number variations. We identified 13 novel and 2 known REEP1 mutations in 16 familial and sporadic patients by direct sequencing analysis. Twelve out of 16 mutations were small insertions, deletions or splice site mutations. These changes would result in shifts of the open-reading-frame followed by premature termination of translation and haploins…

research product

Heterogeneity at the HLA-DRB1 locus and risk for multiple sclerosis.

Variation in major histocompatibility complex genes on chromosome 6p21.3, specifically the human leukocyte antigen HLA-DR2 or DRB1*1501-DQB1*0602 extended haplotype, confers risk for multiple sclerosis (MS). Previous studies of DRB1 variation and both MS susceptibility and phenotypic expression have lacked statistical power to detect modest genotypic influences, and have demonstrated conflicting results. Results derived from analyses of 1339 MS families indicate DRB1 variation influences MS susceptibility in a complex manner. DRB1*15 was strongly associated in families (P=7.8x10(-31)), and a dominant DRB1*15 dose effect was confirmed (OR=7.5, 95% CI=4.4-13.0, P<0.0001). A modest dose effect…

research product

Low frequency and rare coding variation contributes to multiple sclerosis risk

AbstractMultiple sclerosis is a common, complex neurological disease, where almost 20% of risk heritability can be attributed to common genetic variants, including &gt;230 identified by genome-wide association studies (Patsopoulos et al., 2017). Multiple strands of evidence suggest that the majority of the remaining heritability is also due to the additive effects of individual variants, rather than epistatic interactions between these variants, or mutations exclusive to individual families. Here, we show in 68,379 cases and controls that as much as 5% of this heritability is explained by low-frequency variation in gene coding sequence. We identify four novel genes driving MS risk independe…

research product

The Multiple Sclerosis Genomic Map: Role of peripheral immune cells and resident microglia in susceptibility

Abstract:We assembled and analyzed genetic data of 47,351 multiple sclerosis (MS) subjects and 68,284 control subjects and establish a reference map of the genetic architecture of MS that includes 200 autosomal susceptibility variants outside the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), one chromosome X variant, and 32 independent associations within the extended MHC. We used an ensemble of methods to prioritize up to 551 potentially associated MS susceptibility genes, that implicate multiple innate and adaptive pathways distributed across the cellular components of the immune system. Using expression profiles from purified human microglia, we do find enrichment for MS genes in these brain -…

research product

Rare coding variants in PLCG2, ABI3, and TREM2 implicate microglial-mediated innate immunity in Alzheimer's disease

International audience; We identified rare coding variants associated with Alzheimer's disease in a three-stage case-control study of 85,133 subjects. In stage 1, we genotyped 34,174 samples using a whole-exome microarray. In stage 2, we tested associated variants (P < 1 × 10-4) in 35,962 independent samples using de novo genotyping and imputed genotypes. In stage 3, we used an additional 14,997 samples to test the most significant stage 2 associations (P < 5 × 10-8) using imputed genotypes. We observed three new genome-wide significant nonsynonymous variants associated with Alzheimer's disease: a protective variant in PLCG2 (rs72824905: p.Pro522Arg, P = 5.38 × 10-10, odds ratio (OR) = 0.68…

research product

IL12A, MPHOSPH9/CDK2AP1 and RGS1 are novel multiple sclerosis susceptibility loci

A recent meta-analysis identified seven single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with suggestive evidence of association with multiple sclerosis (MS). We report an analysis of these polymorphisms in a replication study that includes 8,085 cases and 7,777 controls. A meta-analysis across the replication collections and a joint analysis with the discovery data set were performed. The possible functional consequences of the validated susceptibility loci were explored using RNA expression data. For all of the tested SNPs, the effect observed in the replication phase involved the same allele and the same direction of effect observed in the discovery phase. Three loci exceeded genome-wide significa…

research product

Genetic relationship between five psychiatric disorders estimated from genome-wide SNPs

AM Vicente - Cross-Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Most psychiatric disorders are moderately to highly heritable. The degree to which genetic variation is unique to individual disorders or shared across disorders is unclear. To examine shared genetic etiology, we use genome-wide genotype data from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) for cases and controls in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We apply univariate and bivariate methods for the estimation of genetic variation within and covariation between disorders. SNPs explained 17-29% of the variance in …

research product

Class II HLA interactions modulate genetic risk for multiple sclerosis

Association studies have greatly refined the understanding of how variation within the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes influences risk of multiple sclerosis. However, the extent to which major effects are modulated by interactions is poorly characterized. We analyzed high-density SNP data on 17,465 cases and 30,385 controls from 11 cohorts of European ancestry, in combination with imputation of classical HLA alleles, to build a high-resolution map of HLA genetic risk and assess the evidence for interactions involving classical HLA alleles. Among new and previously identified class II risk alleles (HLA-DRB1*15:01, HLA-DRB1*13:03, HLA-DRB1*03:01, HLA-DRB1*08:01 and HLA-DQB1*03:02) and cla…

research product

Psychiatric genome-wide association study analyses implicate neuronal, immune and histone pathways

G.B. and S.N. acknowledge funding support for this work from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Mental Health Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King's College London. P.H.L. is supported by US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant K99MH101367. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of psychiatric disorders have identified multiple genetic associations with such disorders, but better methods are needed to derive the underlying biological mechanisms that these signals indicate. We sought to identify biological pathways in GWAS data from over 60,000 participants from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. We developed an an…

research product

Analysis of immune-related loci identifies 48 new susceptibility variants for multiple sclerosis.

International audience; Using the ImmunoChip custom genotyping array, we analyzed 14,498 subjects with multiple sclerosis and 24,091 healthy controls for 161,311 autosomal variants and identified 135 potentially associated regions (P < 1.0 × 10(-4)). In a replication phase, we combined these data with previous genome-wide association study (GWAS) data from an independent 14,802 subjects with multiple sclerosis and 26,703 healthy controls. In these 80,094 individuals of European ancestry, we identified 48 new susceptibility variants (P < 5.0 × 10(-8)), 3 of which we found after conditioning on previously identified variants. Thus, there are now 110 established multiple sclerosis risk variant…

research product

APOE epsilon variation in multiple sclerosis susceptibility and disease severity: some answers

Background: Previous studies have examined the role of APOE variation in multiple sclerosis (MS), but have lacked the statistical power to detect modest genetic influences on risk and disease severity. The meta- and pooled analyses presented here utilize the largest collection, to date, of MS cases, controls, and families genotyped for the APOE epsilon polymorphism. Methods: Studies of MS and APOE were identified by searches of PubMed, Biosis, Web of Science, Cochrane Review, and Embase. When possible, authors were contacted for individual genotype data. Meta-analyses of MS case-control data and family-based analyses were performed to assess the association of APOE epsilon genotype with dis…

research product