A family study of coeliac disease.

Coeliac disease in identical twins.

“…McCrae (1969) suggested that a familial incidence, which may be as high as 44%, is evidence for the genetic basis of coeliac disease and he also emphasised the importance of environmental factors in the pathogenesis of the disease. David and Ajdukiewicz (1975), studying the familial incidence of coeliac disease, encountered 13 (9 %) of 141 patients with a family history, and concluded that the disease could be transmitted by an incompletely penetrant autosomal dominant gene. The female preponderance noted in adult coeliacs was not evident in childhood coeliacs, with or without familial involvement.…”

“…We here report coeliac disease with identical age of onset in a pair of monozygotic twins. This is the only well documented report of concordant monozygotic twins with genetic study, apart from that of David and Ajdukiewicz (1975) which included one set of adult female twins who were 'probably monozygotic'.…”

Risk of coeliac disease in children of patients and effect of HLA genotype.

“…Coeliac disease is known to be familial (Carter et al, 1959;MacDonald et al, 1965; David and Ajdukiewicz, 1975), and to be associated in the population with the antigen HLA-B8 (Falchuk et al, 1972). HLA-B8 probably acts as a marker for a closely linked gene affecting liability and in linkage disequilibrium with it (Harms et al, 1974), though it has been claimed that the HLA-B8 allele itself affects liability (Nelson et al, 1975).…”

Evidence for a dominant gene mechanism underlying coeliac disease in the West of Ireland

“…The presence of another environmental factor (possibly an infective agent) has been suggested. Other complicating factors, such as genetic heterogeneity, have also been raised by various twin studies [Hoffman et al, 1966;Walker-Smith, 1973;David and Ajdukiewicz, 1975;Strober, 19761. Summarizing the results from various reports, Polanco et al [ 19811 estimated a concordance rate of CD among monozygotic (MZ) twins of about 7 1 %.…”