The incidence of type 1 diabetes in Korea is less than 1/10th of that in the United States, and it has been suggested that human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles of Asian patients associated with diabetes differ from those of Caucasians. In this study we analyzed the common susceptibility and transmission pattern of a series of HLA DRB1-DQB1 haplotypes to Korean and Caucasian patients with type 1 diabetes. We performed HLA DR and DQ typing of 158 type 1 diabetic patients in a case control study, 140 nondiabetic subjects from the same geographical area, 49 simplex families from Seoul, and 283 families from the Human Biological Data Interchange. Although the haplotype frequencies in the two populations are quite different, when identical haplotypes are compared, their odds ratios are nearly the same. For all parental haplotypes, the transmission to diabetic offspring was similar for Korean and Caucasian families (r = 0.8; P< 10⁻⁴). Allowing for ethnic differences in allelic associations due to different frequencies of DRB1 and DQB1 haplotypes (linkage disequilibrium), these data show, not only by case-control comparison but also by transmission analyses of the haplotypes, that the susceptibility effects of DRB1-DQB1 haplotypes are consistent in Koreans and Caucasians. Thus, the influence of class II susceptibility and resistance alleles appears to transcend ethnic and geographic diversity of type 1 diabetes.