Common variants at the MHC locus and at chromosome 16q24.1 predispose to Barrett's esophagus

Barrett's esophagus is an increasingly common disease that is strongly associated with reflux of stomach acid and usually a hiatus hernia, and it strongly predisposes to esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC), a tumor with a very poor prognosis. We report the first genome-wide association study on Barrett's esophagus, comprising 1,852 UK cases and 5,172 UK controls in the discovery stage and 5,986 cases and 12,825 controls in the replication stage. Variants at two loci were associated with disease risk: chromosome 6p21, rs9257809 (P(combined) = 4.09 × 10(-9); odds ratio (OR) = 1.21, 95% confidence interval (CI) =1.13-1.28), within the major histocompatibility complex locus, and chromosome 16q24, rs9936833 (P(combined) = 2.74 × 10(-10); OR = 1.14, 95% CI = 1.10-1.19), for which the closest protein-coding gene is FOXF1, which is implicated in esophageal development and structure. We found evidence that many common variants of small effect contribute to genetic susceptibility to Barrett's esophagus and that SNP alleles predisposing to obesity also increase risk for Barrett's esophagus.

Visualising Textual Knowledge about Risks to Aid Risk Communication

This paper demonstrates a potential application for latent semantic analysis and similar techniques in visualising the differences between two levels of knowledge about a risk issue. The HIV/AIDS risk issue will be examined and the semantic clusters of key words in a technical corpora derived from specific literature about HIV/AIDS will be compared with the semantic clusters of those in more general corpora. It is hoped that these comparisons will create a fast and efficient complementary approach to the articulation of mental models of risk issues that could be used to target possible inconsistencies between expert and lay mental models.

The effects of lowering LDL cholesterol with simvastatin plus ezetimibe in patients with chronic kidney disease (Study of Heart and Renal Protection):a randomised placebo-controlled trial

Lowering LDL cholesterol with statin regimens reduces the risk of myocardial infarction, ischaemic stroke, and the need for coronary revascularisation in people without kidney disease, but its effects in people with moderate-to-severe kidney disease are uncertain. The SHARP trial aimed to assess the efficacy and safety of the combination of simvastatin plus ezetimibe in such patients.

Functional study of elafin cleaved by Pseudomonas aeruginosa metalloproteinases

Elafin is a 6-kDa innate immune protein present at several epithelial surfaces including the pulmonary epithelium. It is a canonical protease inhibitor of two neutrophil serine proteases [neutrophil elastase (NE) and proteinase 3] with the capacity to covalently bind extracellular matrix proteins by transglutamination. In addition to these properties, elafin also possesses antimicrobial and immunomodulatory activities. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of Pseudomonas aeruginosa proteases on elafin function. We found that P aeruginosa PAO1-conditioned medium and two purified Pseudomonas metalloproteases, pseudolysin (elastase) and aeruginolysin (alkaline protease), are able to cleave recombinant elafin. Pseudolysin was shown to inactivate the anti-NE activity of elafin by cleaving its protease-binding loop. Interestingly, antibacterial properties of elafin against PAO1 were found to be unaffected after pseudolysin treatment. In contrast to pseudolysin, aeruginolysin failed to inactivate the inhibitory properties of elafin against NE. Aeruginolysin cleaves elafin at the amino-terminal Lys6-Gly7 peptide bond, resulting in a decreased ability to covalently bind purified fibronectin following transglutaminase activity. In conclusion, this study provides evidence that elafin is susceptible to proteolytic cleavage at alternative sites by P aeruginosa metalloproteinases, which can affect different biological functions of elafin.