Commentary on: “A genome-wide association study in Caucasian women suggests the involvement of HLA genes in the severity of facial solar lentigines” by Laville et al., 2016

We have read with interest the study by Laville et al. that was published in the September 2016 issue of PCMR (Laville et al., 2016) and that represents the second genome-wide association study of facial solar lentigines. This study (SU.VI.MAX cohort) showed two novel genetic regions, both located on chromosome 6 [6p22 intergenic region (p=1.6×10-6) and 6p21 USP81P / HLA-C region (p=2.5×10-7)] but both not significantly associated with solar lentigines based on the genome-wide association study. Laville et al. reported, however, that one SNP in the 6p22 region was significantly associated with forehead lentigines in a recessive model (p=1.4×10-8). We were interested in the question of whether we could replicate these findings in our cohort of 2844 Dutch North-Europeans (mean age 67 years, 53% women). This is a subgroup of the Rotterdam Study (RS), for whom facial pigmented spots (mainly solar lentigines) were quantified as the percentage of affected skin area using digital facial photographs (Jacobs et al., 2015).This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.