We explored the occurrence of seven rare variants independently associated with AMD (<i>CFH</i> rs121913059 (p.Arg1210Cys), <i>CFI</i> rs141853578 (p.Gly119Arg), <i>C3</i> rs147859257 (p.Lys155Gln), and <i>C9</i> rs34882957 (p.Pro167Ser)) and three non-coding variants in or near the <i>CFH</i> gene (rs148553336, rs35292876, and rs191281603) in 24 AMD case-control studies.
Carriers of CFH (Arg175Gln and Ser193Leu) and CFI (Gly119Arg and Leu131Arg) variants have an impaired ability to regulate complement activation and may benefit more from complement-inhibiting therapy than patients with AMD in general.
Although these data support the conclusions of van de Ven et al. that the p.Gly119Arg substitution confers a high risk of AMD, our data suggest that this missense mutation is not as rare or as highly penetrant as previously reported.
Here, we report the identification of a rare, highly penetrant missense mutation in CFI encoding a p.Gly119Arg substitution that confers high risk of AMD (P = 3.79 × 10⁻⁶; odds ratio (OR) = 22.20, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 2.98-164.49).