HLA-typing Can Help Spot Celiac Disease in Patients with Type 1 Diabetes

Celiac.com 03/07/2019 - Researchers don’t have much good data on the distribution of the related alleles in the type 1 diabetes Iranian population. In an effort to generate better data, a team of researchers recently set out to assess the frequency of HLA DQ2 and DQ8 haplotypes in patients with type 1 diabetes, with and without celiac disease, and to compare them to the healthy population.

The research team included Ali Moheb-Alian, Flora Forouzesh, Amir Sadeghia, Kamran Rostami, Elham Aghamohammadi, Mohammad Rostami-Nejad, Mostafa Rezaei-Tavirani, and Mohammad Reza Zali.

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The team looked at 70 type 1 diabetes patients who did not have celiac disease, 60 type 1 diabetes cases with celiac disease, and compared them with 150 healthy individuals. 

They collected ten milliliter Gheparinized blood samples, extracted genomic DNA, and genotyped alleles in Real-time PCR using SYBR Green as a low-resolution method. 

They found HLA-DQ2 genotypes in 51% of type 1 diabetes patients without celiac disease, and HLA-DQ8 in 23% of such patients. Just over twenty percent of those patients carried both alleles, while 5% carried neither allele. More than 70% of type 1 diabetes patients with celiac disease had DQ2, while nearly 12% carried DQ8.

Compared to  diabetes patients without celiac disease and the control group, 14% carry both alleles, and 3% carrying neither allele. The frequencies of DQ2 and DQ8 alleles in Iranian healthy population were 19 and 5% respectively.

The similarities in genetic background for celiac disease and type 1 diabetes show that HLA-typing can be serve as a helpful tool for spotting celiac disease in people with type one diabetes.

Read more in the Journal of Diabetes and its Complicationshttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdiacomp.2018.10.001

The researchers are variously affiliated with the Gastroenterology and Liver Diseases Research Center, Research Institute for Gastroenterology and Liver Diseases, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran; the Department of Genetics, Tehran Medical Sciences Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran; the Department of Gastroenterology MidCentral District Health Board, Palmerston North Hospital, New Zealand; the Basic and Molecular Epidemiology of Gastrointestinal Disorders Research Center, Research Institute for Gastroenterology and Liver Diseases, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran; and the Proteomics Research Center, Faculty of Paramedical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.