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SUMMARY The Gm phenotype Gm f,b or Gm f,n,b was found in all forty patients with Graves' disease studied, contrasted with thirty‐five out of forty controls and twenty out of thirty‐one patients with thyroiditis. The difference between the two groups with autoimmune thyroid disease was significant. These results suggest that thyroid stimulating antibodies may be allotypically restricted.

An increased frequency of HL-A 1 and HL-A 8 was found in patients with Graves’ disease and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, when compared to a control group from the same geographic area, and drawn from a pool of subjects attending one diagnostic centre. Furthermore, an increased incidence of W15 and W17 was found in Hashimoto’s thyroiditis; however, these were not detected in any patient with Graves’ disease.

We found the rare properdin factor B(Bf) variant F1 to be present in 11% of 72 patients suffering from insulin-dependent diabetes (IDDM) compared with 2% among 150 normal controls. BfF1 thus confers a relative risk for IDDM of 5.55. All eight patients and three controls who were BfF1 positive were also HLA-B18 positive, reflecting the strong linkage disequilibrium between these two factors. We suggest that BfF1 marks a 'diabetogenic' B18-bearing HLA haplotype. Studies of unselected families with one or more affected members suggest that the B18, BfF1 does not necessarily segregate with IDDM phenotype. This study provides further evidence for the genetic heterogeneity of IDDM.