Large Study Suggests Evidence for a Genetic Component in Rosacea

[Guide]

Evidence for a genetic component to rosacea has been hypothesized, with a retrospective study showing that rosacea patients have a greater than fourfold increased odds of having a family member with rosacea (Abram et al., 2010; Steinhoff et al., 2013), but the genes leading to this association are not known....A genome-wide association study was conducted in 22,952 individuals whose genomes showed >97% European ancestry. Because of the sample size needed for this study, cases and controls were identified by an online questionnaire in which participants responded to a survey item on whether a healthcare professional had ever diagnosed them with rosacea. Participants who answered “yes” were defined as “cases” (n=2,618), and those who answered “no” (n=20,334) were defined as “controls”....

Together, these data strongly suggest a role for antigen presentation by class II HLA in the etiology of rosacea.

The data presented from this large discovery and replication group provide evidence for a genetic component of rosacea. 

J Invest Dermatol. 2015 Jun; 135(6): 1548–1555.
Assessment of the Genetic Basis of Rosacea by Genome-Wide Association Study
Anne Lynn S Chang, Inbar Raber, Jin Xu, Rui Li, Robert Spitale, Julia Chen, Amy K Kiefer, Chao Tian, Nicholas K Eriksson, David A Hinds, and Joyce Y Tung