OBJECTIVES Excess iron stores have been postulated to enhance the risk of ischaemic heart disease. This study aims to determine whether the two major mutations of the haemochromatosis (HFE) gene (C282Y and H63D) are associated with ischaemic heart disease (IHD) or myocardial infarction (MI). DESIGN Cross sectional case-control study. SETTING The geographical area studied by the MONICA (moni...

Polymorphism at codon 72 of p53 results in either the arginine or proline form of p53, whose functional significance in carcinogenesis is controversial. We have investigated if the expression of these p53 polymorphs is selectively regulated, using mRNA from peripheral blood of healthy Asian (Chinese) and the Caucasian (Polish) arginine/proline (arg/pro) heterozygote subjects. Asians were found ...

1. The activity of alanine:glyoxylate aminotransferase (AGT; EC 2.6.1.44) has been measured in the unfractionated livers of 20 patients with primary hyperoxaluria type 1 (PH1), three patients with other forms of primary hyperoxaluria and one PH1 heterozygote. The subcellular distribution of AGT activity was examined in four of the PH1 livers and in the liver of the PH1 heterozygote. 2. The mean...

The life cycle of eukaryotic, sexual species is divided into haploid and diploid phases. In multicellular animals and seed plants, the diploid phase is dominant, and the haploid phase is reduced to one, or a very few cells, which are dependent on the diploid form. In other eukaryotic species, however, the haploid phase may dominate or the phases may be equally developed. Even though an alternat...

Chromosomal defects are relatively frequent in infertile men however, translocations between the Y chromosome and autosomes are rare and less than 40 cases of Y-autosome translocation have been reported. In particular, only three individuals has been described with a Y;21 translocation, up to now. We report on an additional case of an infertile man in whom a Y;21 translocation was associated wi...

Introduction: Intellectual disability or intellectual retardation is a condition in which total mental functioning is distinctively below average and there are disabilities in adaptive behaviors during growth. According to the definition of American Mental Disability Community in 1992 a person is considered intellectually disabled if he or she has an IQ (intelligence quotient) of less than 70...

Effects of inbreeding on individual fitness are of long-standing interest in evolutionary biology and conservation studies. Since estimation of the inbreeding coefficient of a given individual is often impossible in wild populations, some authors have attempted to demonstrate inbreeding depression in such populations by correlating the multi-locus marker heterozygosity of individuals with a tra...

In 1887, Bernard Sachs reported on the clinical features diagnostic signs and symptoms and pathology of a patient with a condition that would someday bear his name(l). It was several decades later before it was discovered that these patients suffered from a recessive genetic trait resulting in the accumulation of a specific ganglioside, GM2, due to the deficiency of the lysosomal enzyme hexosam...