Blood protein phenotypes and effectiveness of the treatment of patients with pulmonary tuberculosis

: Genetic polymorphism at 9 independent loci (HP, GC, TF, PI, PGM1, GLO1, C3, ACP1, and ESD) was studied in two groups of patients with pulmonary tuberculosis and healthy controls. The patients were subdivided into two subgroups depending on their response to chemotherapy: 1) responsive and 2) unresponsive to adequate chemotherapy. The control (Group 3) comprised 327-329 healthy persons; only 78 of them were phenotyped for ESD-locus. A pairwise comparison of arcsinus-transformed both phenotypic and allelic frequencies using t-test revealed significant differences between Groups 1 and 3 in phenotypes--GC 1F-1S, (P = 3.73 x 10(-4), C3 F-S (P = 4.10 x 10(-5), C3 S-S (P = 1.9 x 10(-6) and in alleles--C3*F (P = 4.2 x 10(-6), C3*S (P = 1.7 x 10(-6). These differences are reliable at the levels of significance, Pc corrected by all numbers of times, k, of independent pairwise comparisons (k = 126 for phenotypes, Pc = 0.00041; k = 60 for alleles, Pc = 0.000855). Differences between Groups 2 and 3 were significant as well: there were 8 P values both for phenotypes and alleles, which rejected the null-hypothesis at 5% significance while the expected numbers of times, kch, to reject the null-hypothesis by chance, were kch = 6.3 for phenotypes and kch = 3 for alleles. Differences between the two subgroups of patients were found to be insignificant because the P values were obtained, that rejected the null-hypothesis only 6 and 3 times for phenotypes and alleles, respectively. Principal component analysis showed that the GLO1 locus was not informative for the differences in the groups studied. The perspectives of further analysis of the data presented using the remaining 8 loci are discussed.