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Not sure we can put too much weight into the information... for one, I answered with all of my ancestry and not only my father's side from which the AS comes. Would help if everyone knew from what line in their ancestry the AS came.

We have posters from all over Europe, however most are from England/Scotland as they speak English.

It is interesting... and a few here have thrown out the idea of hunter/gatherers and those closer to equator first started eating bread/grains etc and the impacts of microevolution (less B27's closer to equator... more further away i.e. England, Scandanavia, Germany etc....) over time on the population. At least this information on the surface would seem to support that.

Tim



I am not so certain that such a theory is provable because there are some of us who have AS symptoms but we are not HLAB27+.

The research that had been done in the past had pointed to the genetic link associated with HLAB27 but it seems that this only points to a subset of patients who were diagnosed with RA but were seronegative for the tests related to the rheumatoid factor.

My ancestry goes back a few generations. My father is dead so I am not able to establish whether or not he had specific back problems that might have been undiagnosed AS. There is Irish, English, Scots and German on his side. My mother is alive but she does not have symptoms of AS and my grandmother did not have these symptoms either. My mother's ancestry is Irish and English.

What is relevant here is that I first had problems after I had a dose of the flu (or at least this is the first time that I recorded a positive ANA that required investigation). When I first had problems I did not have the inflammatory indicators including a positive for the rheumatoid factor. It took roughly 10 years before my rheumatoid factor became positive. During that time I continued to have a lot of pain that was being passed off as fibromyalgia. However, fibromyalgia is not supposed to be a low grade inflammatory arthritis.

The first rheumatolgist who thought but did not tell me at the time that I might have spondyloarthropathy was the one I saw in Townsville. This is when I was doing things such as swimming in winter and walking almost every day until I started having hip pain. This was also the time that I began investigating for myself whether or not I had AS. What put me off during that time was the fact that I am a woman, and I did not have the HLAB27 gene.

The results so far are quite interesting because of the prevalence of the Irish in our ancestry. Is there some other common link other than HLAB27? This is a question that needs answers.

There is not much evidence of autoimmune disease in my family tree, even though I can point to a great aunt and my neice because they have been diagnosed with RA. This is perhaps a clue for those of us who are not positive for the HLAb27 gene. None of this has anything to do with what we eat. I maintain that bread and potatoes have no impact upon the development of AS.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life