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Variant in PNPLA3 is associated with alcoholic liver disease

Abstract

Two genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have described associations of variants in PNPLA3 with nonalcoholic fatty liver and plasma liver enzyme levels. We investigated the contributions of these variants to liver disease in Mestizo subjects with a history of alcohol dependence. We found that rs738409 in PNPLA3 is strongly associated with alcoholic liver disease and clinically evident alcoholic cirrhosis (unadjusted OR= 2.25, P=1.7 × 10−10; ancestry-adjusted OR=1.79, P=1.9 × 10−5).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the individual participants in the study who made this work possible; D. Cox, N. Patil, N. Shen and C. Hacker for their work to obtain and characterize the samples; E. Beasley and M. Mealiffe for guidance; and E. Beilharz, T. Genschoreck, M. Kelleher, M. Kennemer, A. Ollmann, K. Pant and S. Pitts for technical assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

D.G.B. participated in the conception and design of the study. D.K. provided the samples used in the study. R.P.S. directed the genotyping experiments. D.A.H. and C.T. analyzed the data and drafted the manuscript. All authors contributed to the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to David A Hinds.

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Competing interests

C.T, R.P.S., D.G.B. and D.A.H. were employees of Perlegen Sciences during this work. A provisional patent application has been filed by Perlegen Sciences that includes material presented in this publication.

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Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Note, Supplementary Tables 1–4 and Supplementary Figures 1–5 (PDF 1089 kb)

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Tian, C., Stokowski, R., Kershenobich, D. et al. Variant in PNPLA3 is associated with alcoholic liver disease. Nat Genet 42, 21–23 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.488

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