Chest
Clinical InvestigationsDistribution of α1-Antitrypsin Alleles in Patients With Bronchiectasis
Section snippets
Patients and Control Population
We retrospectively studied all the clinical files in our department between January 1991 and June 1996. Two hundred forty patients were classified as having bronchiectasis according to the World Health Organization International Classification of Diseases.9 All these subjects were hospitalized or were seen at the outpatient clinic of our department. AAT phenotype analysis was already available for a few patients or was retrospectively determined in as many patients as possible. Twenty-five
Patients' Data
The study population involved 202 patients (104 men and 98 women) with a mean age (SD) of 63.7 ± 15.4 years (range, 17 to 90 years). One hundred ninety-seven patients (97.5%) were white, 4 were African (2.0%), and one was Asian (0.5%). One hundred thirteen patients were nonsmokers (55.9%), 58 were ex-smokers (28.7%), and 31 were active smokers (15.3%). Diagnosis of bronchiectasis was assessed by CT scan alone in 178 patients, CT scan and bronchography in 16 patients, bronchography alone in 1
Discussion
Our study indicates that AAT phenotype distribution and gene frequencies are not different between patients with bronchiectasis and control subjects. We observed the presence of one PI*Z homozygous and two PI*I heterozygous individuals in the subgroup of bronchiectatic patients with emphysema. Although our observation regarding the Z allele is not surprising, inasmuch as this allele is associated with an increased incidence of emphysema, it is more surprising regarding the I allele, the
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Luis Carlos Molano and Richard Medeiros for their advice in editing the manuscript.
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