305: Histocompatibility Alleles Conferring Susceptibility to Canine Diabetes, Immune-Mediated Thyroiditis and Immune-Mediated Hemolytic Anemia
Grant Status: Closed
Project Summary
Autoimmune diseases cause significant amounts of mortality and debilitating disease in dogs. In humans many autoimmune diseases occur only in individuals expressing one of the few predisposing histocompatibility genes. For example, all cases of type I diabetes in humans are associated with only a few of the many alleleic forms of class II histocompatibility genes. Consequently, if the frequencies of these few alleles were reduced by half, the incidence of diabetes would be reduced by half. Here it was proposed to characterize histocompatibility susceptibility alleles for three major, heritable canine autoimmune diseases - diabetes, immune-mediated thyroiditis and immune-mediated hemolytic anemia. If any of these three debilitating (or lethal) autoimmune diseases have a restricted number of susceptibility alleles it will allow: (1) development of diagnostic tests for identifying individuals at risk for prophylactic therapy and research and (2) reduction of he incidence of the disease by selective breeding of individuals carrying the predisposing histocompatibility alleles. For each of the three autoimmune diseases, the researchers proposed to collect DNA samples from approximately 100 purebred dogs diagnosed with the disease and clone and sequence the histocompatibility genes. From the data collected, no genetic association could be detected between the affected and unaffected samples.
Publication(s)
None at this time.
Help Future Generations of Dogs
Participate in canine health research by providing samples or by enrolling in a clinical trial. Samples are needed from healthy dogs and dogs affected by specific diseases.
