Association of HMOX-1 with sporadic Alzheimer's disease in southern Han Chinese.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to discover the associations between HMOX-1 and Alzheimer's disease (AD). METHODS: A total of 500 AD patients and 500 healthy controls were recruited in this study. Polymer chain reaction was used. RESULTS: There was a statistically significant difference between AD patients and controls in both the dominant and recessive models of HMOX-1 rs2071746 after adjustment for age, gender and education (dominant model: p = 0.047, odds ratio [OR] 1.34, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.00-1.78, adjusted; recessive model: p = 0.049, OR 1.34, 95% CI 1.00-1.80, adjusted). There was also a trend for an association between the dominant model and late-onset AD after adjustment for age, gender and education (dominant model: p = 0.084, OR 1.37, 95% CI 0.96-1.95, adjusted). CONCLUSIONS: We found an association between the dominant and recessive models of HMOX1 rs2071746 and AD.

Association between fatigue and motor progression in Parkinson's disease in southern Chinese.

STUDY OBJECTIVES: The aim was to investigate whether fatigue could predict the development of motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD) in a southern Chinese population. METHODS: In total, 246 PD patients were recruited. All patients were evaluated by Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS), Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale, Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, and Unified PD Rating Scale provided by Movement Disorders Society (MDS-UPDRS). MDS-UPDRS was re-evaluated after 2 years. RESULTS: FSS scores were associated with total score and subparts of MDS-UPDRS (total: p 0.039, p 0.030, adjusted; part III: p 0.022, p 0.016, adjusted). CONCLUSIONS: The symptom of subjective fatigue could predict the progression of PD.

A population-based LD map of the human chromosome 6p.

The recent publication of the complete sequence of human chromosome 6 provides a platform from which to investigate genomic sequence variation. We report here a detailed linkage disequilibrium (LD) pattern map across the entire human chromosome 6p by using a set of 1152 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a population of 198 Singaporean Chinese, with 326 SNPs focused in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region. Our analysis shows some unexpectedly high segments of strong LD in a 10-Mb region that includes the extremely polymorphic and gene-rich MHC loci and many non-MHC genes. These include the telomeric peri-MHC region that harbors olfactory receptors, histones and zinc finger clusters, and the centromeric peri-MHC region that contains several unknown open reading frames. The data also help refine a human-mouse synteny break in the region between 28.6 and 29.4 Mb. The population-based LD map presented here will provide an essential resource for understanding the genomic sequence variation of chromosome 6p and LD mapping of disease genes of complex genetic traits.