Abstract
Twenty patients with idiopathic "warm" autoimmune haemolytic anaemia and 40 controls were types concurrently for human leucocyte antigens (HLA) A, B, C, and DRW. There was a significantly stronger association of HLA-B8 with the disease (chi 2 = 10.39; p = 0.018) than HLA-DRW3 (chi 2 = 3.71; P = 0.35) and the patients also showed a significant increase in BW6 homozygosity (chi 2 = 7.13; P = 0.01) and a corresponding reduction in BW4 (chi 2 = 7.13; P = 0.02). (All p values corrected for number of antigens at each locus.) These findings suggest that susceptibility to idiopathic autoimmune haemolytic anaemia is associated more closely with the HLA-B locus than with DRW3.