title: Common HLA alleles associated with health, but not with facial attractiveness.
abstract: Three adaptive hypotheses have been proposed to explain the link between the human leucocyte antigen (hla) genes, health measures and facial attractiveness: inbreeding avoidance, heterozygote advantage and frequency-dependent selection. This paper reports findings that support a new hypothesis relating HLA to health. We suggest a new method to quantify the level of heterozygosity. HLA heterozygosity did not significantly predict health measures in women, but allele frequency did. Women with more common HLA alleles reported fewer cold and flu bouts per year, fewer illnesses in the previous year and rated themselves healthier than women with rare alleles. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show a positive correlation between HLA allele frequency and general health measures. We propose that certain common HLA alleles confer resistance to prevalent pathogens. Nevertheless, neither HLA heterozygosity nor allele frequency significantly predicted how healthy or attractive men rated the female volunteers. Three non-mutually exclusive explanations are put forward to explain this finding.
authors.affiliation: Department of Genetics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa. vcoetzee@tuks.co.za
authors.forename: Vinet
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Coetzee
authors.forename: Louise
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Barrett
authors.forename: Jaco M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Greeff
authors.forename: S Peter
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Henzi
authors.forename: David I
authors.initials: DI
authors.lastname: Perrett
authors.forename: Ahmed A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Wadee
mesh_terms: D000483:Alleles; D001504:Beauty; D004843:Epistasis, Genetic; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D005787:Gene Frequency; D006680:HLA Antigens / Q000235:genetics*; D006304:Health Status; D006579:Heterozygote; D006801:Humans; D007178:Inbreeding; D008297:Male; D018579:Patient Selection; D012724:Sex Attractants / Q000235:genetics*; D012727:Sex Characteristics
chemical_list: D006680:HLA Antigens; D012724:Sex Attractants