Detection of human papillomavirus in dental biofilm and the uterine cervix of a pregnant adolescent.

Context: Adolescence and pregnancy are considered to be risk factors for human papillomavirus (HPV) infection. The relationship between this infection in the uterine cervix and oral HPV infection is controversial.

Case Report: This report describes a case of a pregnant 16-year-old adolescent who presented HPV infection in the uterine cervix and the mouth.

TNF -308G>A single nucleotide polymorphism is associated with leprosy among Brazilians: a genetic epidemiology assessment, meta-analysis, and functional study.

Leprosy is an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae. Tumor necrosis factor (TNF) plays a key role in the host response. Some association studies have implicated the single nucleotide polymorphism TNF -308G>A in leprosy susceptibility, but these results are still controversial.

HLA-DRB1*04 and DRB1*10 are associated with resistance and susceptibility, respectively, in Brazilian and Vietnamese leprosy patients.

The host genetic background has been considered one of the factors that influence leprosy outcome, a chronic infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae. Genome scans demonstrated that the 6p21 region is associated with leprosy and a substantial number of population-based studies analyzing human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class II loci suggested association of HLA-DR with leprosy. However, some studies lacked robustness as they had limited power.

Stepwise replication identifies a low-producing lymphotoxin-alpha allele as a major risk factor for early-onset leprosy.

Host genetics has an important role in leprosy, and variants in the shared promoter region of PARK2 and PACRG were the first major susceptibility factors identified by positional cloning. Here we report the linkage disequilibrium mapping of the second linkage peak of our previous genome-wide scan, located close to the HLA complex. In both a Vietnamese familial sample and an Indian case-control sample, the low-producing lymphotoxin-alpha (LTA)+80 A allele was significantly associated with an increase in leprosy risk (P = 0.

Genetics of host response in leprosy.

In this review, we discuss recently accumulated data, analysing genetic influence on leprosy outcome. Most leprosy-related epidemiological studies are based on the comparison of frequencies of genetic markers in case-control designs using candidate genes, mainly on immunological pathways. Genomic scans using family-based designs also identified some chromosome regions to be tested for association with leprosy.