Genetics

This post covers Sombekke and colleagues' 2011 AJNR exploratory study, which tested 69 candidate SNPs against voxelwise lesion probability in 208 MS patients. It follows the literature-based SNP selection and the cohort, the registration pipeline that brought 208 brains into one template, the three-way genotype comparison and its two confound-handling steps, the 11 genotypes producing exclusively periventricular clusters, the single result that survives correction for total brain lesion volume with its per-genotype lesion frequencies, the HLA-DRB1*1501 null result, the asymmetry the authors cannot explain, their three limitations, and the focused follow-up they call for.