Chronic Lyme arthritis and HLA alleles (Reply)

To the Editor: In their paper in the July 26 issue,¹ Steere et al. state in the Results section that the frequency of HLA-DR4 was significantly greater in patients with chronic arthritis than in normal subjects (57 vs. 31 percent, P<0.01). This statement is evidently incorrect; in fact, the correct P value (calculated by Fisher's exact test and then multiplied by the number of specificities tested at each locus, as stated in the Methods section) is 0.014 × 7, or 0.1, as reported in Table 1 in the paper. Thus, HLA-DR4 seems to be more frequent in patients with chronic. .