It has been proposed that negatively charged aspartic acid at position 57 of the HLA-DQ beta-chain determines resistance to development of insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM), whereas genetic susceptibility to IDDM correlates with a neutral amino acid residue. The disease rate is very low in Oriental populations with high frequencies of Asp 57. This raises a question whether the high incidence of IDDM in Finland could be explained by the distribution of this disease marker. In this study, the polymerase chain reaction products of 86 diabetic patients and 115 nondiabetic control subjects were analyzed with seven sequence-specific oligonucleotide probes. Only 25.5% of the diabetic subjects were phenotyped as Asp 57+ compared to 82% of control subjects, which suggests that Asp 57 negativity is a definite risk marker for developing IDDM in Finnish patients. However, the susceptibility conferred by various non-Asp and Asp haplotypes was not equally strong: DQw8 was the most important risk marker and DQw6 the most protective one. The frequency of Asp 57+ DQw4 was similar in diabetic patients and control subjects. The highest genotype-associated relative risk was defined by DQw2/DQw8 heterozygosity (RR 91), whereas it was 13 for non-Asp homozygosity. In the control subjects, the frequency of Asp 57+ phenotypes was higher than in several white populations with lower IDDM incidence figures. We conclude that the disease risk in Finland appears to be most strongly related to specific Asp 57- alleles, although other HLA- or non-HLA-associated genes may also contribute to IDDM susceptibility in this population.