No abstract

Polymorphisms in XRCC1 Arg399Gln and APE1 Asp148Glu significantly increased the rate of apoptosis and risk of ulcerative colitis.

The population of India harbors one of the world’s most highly diverse gene pools, owing to the influx of successive waves of immigrants over regular periods in time. Several phylogenetic studies involving mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomal variation have demonstrated Europeans to have been the first settlers in India. Nevertheless, certain controversy exists, due to the support given to the thesis that colonization was by the Austro-Asiatic group, prior to the Europeans. Thus, the aim was to investigate pre-historic colonization of India by anatomically modern humans, using conserved stretches of five amino acid (EPIYA) sequences in the cagA gene of Helicobacter pylori. Simultaneously, the existence of a pathogenic relationship of tyrosine phosphorylation motifs (TPMs), in 32 H. pylori strains isolated from subjects with several forms of gastric diseases, was also explored. High resolution sequence analysis of the above described genes was performed. The nucleotide sequences obtained were translated into amino acids using MEGA (version 4.0) software for EPIYA. An MJ-Network was constructed for obtaining TPM haplotypes by using NETWORK (version 4.5) software. The findings of the study suggest that Indian H. pylori strains share a common ancestry with Europeans. No specific association of haplotypes with the outcome of disease was revealed through additional network analysis of TPMs.

<b><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:'Arial','sans-serif';">Ulcerative colitis is considered frequent in majority of European and North American population and exceptional in most of the developing Asian countries. There is a dearth of reported data from South India on the incidence of the disease and its prevalence. Hence the present study was designed to estimate the prevalence of ulcerative colitis in a tertiary care hospital of Hyderabad, South India. The study population consisted of 157 Ulcerative colitis and 204 healthy subjects. All subjects were interviewed by means of a questionnaire for general demographical details and socioeconomic conditions, health related quality of life and history of UC. Patients were categorized based on disease severity; moderate: 95, and severe: 62 and disease manifestation: 73 (46.5%) pancolitis, 60 (38.2%) left-sided colitis and 24 (15.3%) had proctosigmoiditits. Disease prevalence was high in patients of <35 years age. Junk/outside food consumers were significantly high in Ulcerative colitis than controls 68 (43.3%) vs 67 (32.8%) p = 0.048. There was no significant difference of disease prevalence with diet, drinking habits and alcoholic consumption. Whereas UC prevalence was high in nonsmokers than smokers (p = 0.025). This report establishes the importance of various factors in ulcerative colitis. This is the first population based study from South India that reports the prevalence of ulcerative colitis. Ulcerative colitis is more predominant in young age. Further, junk food consumers and Non-smokers/ex-smokers were found to be high in terms of UC prevalence.</span></b>