A 2018 meta-analysis of over 200,000 people found 41 risk loci for allergic rhinitis — hay fever — including fine-mapped positions in the HLA region tied to how the immune system recognizes allergens.
Allergic rhinitis — commonly known as hay fever — is inflammation of the nasal passages triggered by an allergen such as pollen, dust mites, or pet dander. It is the most common clinical presentation of allergy, estimated to affect 400 million people worldwide, with rising incidence in industrialized countries.
Waage et al. 2018 meta-analysed allergic rhinitis across European-ancestry cohorts, comparing 59,762 cases against 152,358 controls, and identified 41 risk loci in total — 20 of them not previously linked to allergic rhinitis — all confirmed in a separate replication of 60,720 cases and 618,527 controls. Functional annotation implicated genes across multiple immune pathways, and fine-mapping of the HLA region — the genomic stretch that encodes how the immune system presents fragments of foreign proteins to T-cells — pointed to specific amino-acid positions important for antigen binding.
This page's own variants include rs34004019 in HLA-DQB1, sitting directly in the fine-mapped HLA region; rs28361986 in CXCR5, a gene guiding immune-cell trafficking; and rs12939457 in GSDMB, a gene also linked on this site's asthma page — a gene shared between two allergic conditions the paper's authors note often occur together.
Allergic rhinitis is diagnosed from symptoms and, often, allergy testing — not from genotype. The variants here describe population-level risk found in a large meta-analysis; none of them is used clinically to diagnose the condition or choose a treatment.
Standard care for allergic rhinitis — allergen avoidance, antihistamines, nasal corticosteroids, and allergen immunotherapy for more severe cases — is unaffected by any variant on this page. The HLA fine-mapping in the source study is a research finding about the underlying immune mechanism, not a clinical test.
What a 23andMe/AncestryDNA export or raw VCF can and can't tell you about Allergic Rhinitis comes down to these specific, well-studied positions — not a diagnosis.
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Allergic rhinitis, commonly called hay fever, is inflammation of the nasal passages triggered by an allergen such as pollen, dust mites, or pet dander. It is the most common form of allergy, estimated to affect 400 million people worldwide.
A meta-analysis of 59,762 cases and 152,358 controls found 41 risk loci for allergic rhinitis, 20 of them newly identified, confirmed in a replication of 60,720 cases and 618,527 controls. Fine-mapping of the HLA region pointed to specific amino-acid positions important for antigen binding.
The HLA region encodes proteins that present fragments of foreign substances to the immune system's T-cells. Variation there can change how readily the immune system reacts to a given allergen.
No. These are population-level statistical associations from a large meta-analysis. Allergic rhinitis is diagnosed from symptoms and allergy testing, not from genotype.
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