To present a systematic evaluation of 47 non-MHC ankylosing spondylitis (AS) susceptibility loci that have been initially discovered through white genome-wide association studies in Han Chinese.

Originally, 10,743 samples representing north and south Chinese in 4 datasets were obtained. After data quality control and imputation, metaanalysis results of 94,621 variants within 47 loci were extracted. Four ERAP1 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) and HLA-B27 tag SNP rs13202464 were used for interaction analysis. Population-attributable risk percentages of AS-associated variants were compared. Functional annotations of AS-associated variants were conducted using HaploReg, RegulomeDB, and rVarBase databases.

We revealed 16 AS-associated variants with nominal evidence in Han Chinese, including rs10865331 (p = 6.30 × 10−10), rs10050860 (p = 4.09 × 10−5) and rs8070463 (p = 1.03 × 10−4). Potential susceptible SNP within these 47 loci were also identified, such as rs13024541 (2p15), rs17401719 (5q15), and rs62074054 (17q21). Epistatic interactions between 3 ERAP1 SNP (rs17401719, rs30187, and rs10050860) and HLA-B27 were confirmed.

Reference link- https://www.jrheum.org/content/47/5/674

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