Insights into the development of alcoholic chronic pancreatitis at Soweto, South Africa: a controlled cross-sectional study.

Objective: We asked why so few working-class Africans of Soweto have chronic pancreatitis (CP) when alcoholism is the norm.

Methods: Twenty-one alcoholics with acute psychosis but normal pancreas were investigated for lifestyle, micronutrient status, electrophilic stress, and iron overload.

Results: Alcoholics consumed more ethanol daily than did 14 previously studied patients with CP (P = 0.

Chronic pancreatitis.

Chronic pancreatitis is a progressive fibroinflammatory disease that exists in large-duct (often with intraductal calculi) or small-duct form. In many patients this disease results from a complex mix of environmental (eg, alcohol, cigarettes, and occupational chemicals) and genetic factors (eg, mutation in a trypsin-controlling gene or the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator); a few patients have hereditary or autoimmune disease. Pain in the form of recurrent attacks of pancreatitis (representing paralysis of apical exocytosis in acinar cells) or constant and disabling pain is usually the main symptom.

Micronutrient therapy for chronic pancreatitis: rationale and impact.

Micronutrient therapy, designed to buttress tissue methyl and thiol groups, curbs attacks and controls background pain in patients with chronic pancreatitis, irrespective of aetiology. This outcome and the premises upon which it is based facilitate an understanding of links with mutations in genes for hereditary pancreatitis and cystic fibrosis, demography, and predisposition to pancreatic cancer. Above all, there is an opportunity for prophylaxis in individuals at high risk of developing the disease.

'Not knowing something is normally a milestone on the way to knowledge'. An interview with Joan M. Braganza, DSc, FRCP, FRCPath, Reader Emeritus, University of Manchester, UK.

Dr. Joan Braganza, a world expert in the field of chronic pancreatitis, proposed a new template for its pathogenesis based on the role of free radical pathology, in particular the heightened but unmitigated oxidative detoxification reactions via cytochromes P450. Dr.

Dietary antioxidant lack, impaired hepatic glutathione reserve, and cholesterol gallstones.

Background: Theoretical considerations and experimental studies suggest a causal connection between micronutrient antioxidant insufficiency and the development of human gallstones.

Methods: Fasting plasma/serum samples from 24 patients with cholesterol gallstones-on unchanged lifestyles-were analysed for the four main micronutrient antioxidants, glutathione and factors that impact or report upon glutathione homeostasis. The results were assessed by comparison with laboratory referent ranges.

Acute pancreatitis in Soweto, South Africa: relationship between trypsinogen load, trypsinogen activation, and fibrinolysis.

Objective: It is not known why acute pancreatitis in Soweto, South Africa, pursues an aggressive course. We sought clues from circulating trypsinogen load at admission as marker of initial acinar injury, trypsinogen activation using the carboxypeptidase B activation peptide as surrogate, proteinase inhibitors, the coagulation-fibrinolysis axis, indicators of inflammation, oxidative stress markers, and antioxidant status. This article reports on the first four aspects.