Ice Bucket Challenge funds major ALS breakthrough. her.ie - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from her.ie Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Videos of people from around the world accepting the challenge earnt tens of millions of views across social media. Around 5,000 people in the UK and 30,000 in the US have the condition.
Epidemiological studies have reported an association between amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and different autoimmune disorders. This study aims to explore the causal relationship between autoimmune disorders and ALS using Mendelian randomization (MR). To test the genetically predicted effects of liability towards immune-related outcomes on ALS risk, we used summary statistics from the largest European genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for these disorders in a two-sample MR setting. To do this, we extracted single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from the GWAS, which strongly associated with the 12 traits, and queried their effects in a large European ALS GWAS (27,265 cases and 110,881 controls). To avoid bias in our MR instruments related to the complex linkage disequilibrium structure of the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region, we excluded SNPs within this region from the analyses. We computed inverse-variance weighted (IVW) MR estimates and undertook sensitivity analyses us