ABO blood type B and fucosyltransferase 2 non-secretor status as genetic risk factors for chronic pancreatitis

Sir, We thank Kirsten et al1 for their comments on our recent study,2 in which we reported a genome-wide analysis on ~4000 volunteers from the population-based Study of Health in Pommerania (SHIP) cohort3 with replication in 1444 blood donors. We had found a significant association between higher serum lipase activities and three single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) as well as the fucosyltransferase-2 (FUT2) non-secretor status (homozygosity for the FUT2 p.W134X mutation) and the ABO blood type B (figure 1). In more than 1000 patients with pancreatitis, we confirmed that FUT2 non-secretor status and blood type B are also disease risk factors, with a greater than twofold OR for blood type B compared with blood type O. Kirsten et al have tried to replicate the third part of our study by genotyping the SNP rs632111 (FUT2) and rs8176693 (ABO) in 1458 patients with...

Source: Gut - January 6, 2016 Category: Gastroenterology Authors: Weiss, F. U., Schurmann, C., Teumer, A., Mayerle, J., Simon, P., Völzke, H., Greinacher, A., Kuehn, J.-P., Zenker, M., Völker, U., Homuth, G., Lerch, M. M. Tags: PostScript Source Type: research