A CCR6 variant strongly associated with rheumatoid arthritis in two populations is not associated with ankylosing spondylitis

Rheumatol Int (2013) 33:24432444 DOI 10.1007/s00296-012-2404-6

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

A CCR6 variant strongly associated with rheumatoid arthritis in two populations is not associated with ankylosing spondylitis

Carla J. Cohen Tugce Karaderi

Jennifer J. Pointon B. Paul Wordsworth

Received: 4 November 2011 / Accepted: 11 March 2012 / Published online: 8 April 2012 Springer-Verlag 2012

To the Editor,

There is substantial genetic overlap between many inammatory diseases, including ankylosing spondylitis (AS), rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and Crohns disease (CD). Two single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in CCR6, which exhibit near complete linkage disequilibrium (LD) (D0 = 0.98, r2 = 0.94, HapMap rel 28 Phases II ? III 2010

NCBI B36 dbSNP b126), are strongly associated with RA in Europeans (rs3093023, p = 3.3 9 10-7) and Japanese (rs3093024, p = 7.7 9 10-19) [1, 2]. A robust association (p = 1.04 9 10-12) between rs2301436 (approximately 98 kb upstream of CCR6) and CD has also been reported [3]. We and others have previously demonstrated shared genetic effects in the Th17 pathway between AS and CD, including IL23R and STAT3 [4, 5]. We therefore sought to test for an association between AS and CCR6, a chemokine receptor expressed by Th17 lymphocytes.

Three SNPs (rs3093003, rs3798315 and rs3093009) in CCR6 have previously been genotyped in a large AS case control study and rs2301436 has been genotyped in two AS casecontrol studies [5, 6]; none...