Human lymphocyte antigens in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

An increasing number of genetic studies in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy challenge conventional views on inheritance and suggest genetic heterogeneity or non-genetic disease. We have found changes in relative risk for some antigens with significantly increased frequency of HLA antigen DR4 in this condition. These findings are consistent with there being a genetic component in susceptibility to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. No evidence was found for HLA linkage using either sib pair analysis or lod scores. This suggests that hypertrophic cardiomyopathy does not have a disease susceptibility gene related to the HLA region on the short arm of chromosome number six. Population HLA associations with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy must thus be explained by other influences of the genetic background on disease susceptibility.