A number of localizations for the putative susceptibility gene(s)
have been identified for both
Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. In a genome wide scan, Hugot
et al. (1996) identified a region
on chromosome 16 which appeared to be responsible for the inheritance of
inflammatory bowel
disease in a small proportion of families. Subsequent work has suggested
that this localization is
important for susceptibility to Crohn's disease rather than ulcerative
colitis (Ohmen et al. 1996;
Parkes et al. 1996). We investigated the contribution of this
localization to the inheritance of
inflammatory bowel disease in 54 multiplex Australian families, and confirmed
its importance in a
significant proportion of Crohn's disease families; we further refined
the localization to a region near
to D16S409, obtaining a maximum LOD score of 6.3 between D16S409 and D16S753.