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Joint study of the associations of HLA‐B and the transmembrane short tandem repeat polymorphism of MICA protein with alopecia areata shows independent associations of both with the disease

Alopecia areata (AA) is a skin disease that produces hair loss in patches of skin. The underlying mechanism of AA is a loss of immune privilege of hair follicles, which are then attacked by natural killer (NK) cells. A previous genome‐wide association study linked single nucleotide polymorphisms of the protein MHC class I chain‐related A (MICA) to this disease. MICA is the ligand for the activating receptor NKG2D, expressed mainly by NK cells and CD8+ cytotoxic T cells. As the aforementioned study did not include short tandem repeats (STRs) of MICA, we decided to study these in relation to AA.