Association of HLA-B40 and DRW9 with Japanese alcoholic liver cirrhosis.

Seventy-seven chronic alcoholics with liver disease were studied to evaluate the HLA antigen association. There were no significant differences of HLA antigen phenotype frequencies (PF) between the patients and controls regarding A and C loci, (62 healthy Japanese). Prevalences of HLA-B40 complex (B40 . 48 . 13) and DRW9 tended to increase among chronic alcoholics. When chronic alcoholics were divided according to whether they had liver cirrhosis or not, the cirrhosis group (42 cases) revealed a significantly higher frequency of HLA-DRW9 (chi 2 = 10.88, p less than 0.001, corrected p less than 0.05, relative risk (R.R.) = 4.17) as compared to controls. There was also a tendency of B40 complex to increase in frequency (chi 2 = 5.51, p less than 0.05, R.R. = 2.65) in the cirrhosis group. Haplotype frequency and linkage disequilibrium parameters of HLA-B40 . 48-DRW9 were significantly higher than those of controls. Moreover, the increased frequency of DRW9 in the cirrhosis group was similar to that in autoimmune disease like ulcerative colitis or SLE. These data suggest that HLA-DRW9 and/or HLA-B40-DRW9 might be closely associated with susceptibility to developing alcoholic cirrhosis and that autoimmune mechanisms might be involved partly in its etiology.