Application of the lod score method to detection of linkage between HLA and juvenile insulin-dependent diabetes

The lod score method has been applied to 28 informative families with at least one child suffering from juvenile insulin-dependent diabetes (JIDD), assuming autosomal recessive inheritance, for detection of linkage between HLA and a susceptibility locus for this disease. These 28 families were pooled with 21 other families from the literature. The maximum lod scores were obtained for recombination fractions from 4 to 16 %, according to the level of penetrance (10 to 90 %). These high estimates of the recombination fraction are not in agreement with the hypothesis that the association between JIDD and specific HLA haplotypes is due to a simple linkage disequilibrium between the HLA region and a susceptibility locus for JIDD.