Disease relevance of West Indies

• A 1972 historic sera collection from two health districts in Barbados, British West Indies, was evaluated for risk factors and epidemiologic patterns of HTLV-I (human T cell leukemia virus type I) during a time prior to the first report of its discovery in 1980 [1].
• This fruit also grows in other Caribbean islands, as well as North and Central America. Hypoglycin A is one of the toxic compounds found in unripe ackees and is capable of inducing hypoglycemia [2].
• SETTING: University Hospital of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica. SUBJECTS: Twenty women with symptomatic uterine fibroids scheduled for myomectomy who satisfied entry criteria: 10 randomised to the vasopressin group and 10 to the control group [3].
• Ciguatera fish poisoning in the Caribbean islands and Western Atlantic [4].
• METHODS: Urinary albumin, BP and anthropometric measurements were carried out in patients attending the hypertension clinic of the University Hospital of the West Indies [5].

High impact information on West Indies

• Here we report observations of BrO and SO2 abundances in the plume of the Soufrière Hills volcano (Montserrat) in May 2002 by ground-based multi-axis differential optical absorption spectroscopy [6].
• A single-base-pair deletion in exon 7 of the human carbonic anhydrase II gene was found to be the molecular defect in a group of independently ascertained, clinically heterogeneous, Hispanic carbonic anhydrase II-deficient patients, all of whom had ancestors from the Caribbean islands [7].
• Nineteen of the 30 infected patients were parenteral drug abusers, 10 were from Caribbean Islands and had no identified risk factor, and one was a homosexual male [8].
• Freely foraging ARGIOPE: argentata (Araneae: Araneoidea), collected from 13 Caribbean islands, produced dragline silk that showed an inverse relationship between the amount of serine and glycine they contained [9].
• Low relative prevalence of IDDM in French West Indies [10].

Chemical compound and disease context of West Indies

• Cerasee, a wild variety of Momordica charantia is traditionally prepared as a tea for the treatment of diabetes mellitus in the West Indies and Central America. To investigate a possible hypoglycaemic effect, concentrated aqueous extracts of cerasee were administered to normal and streptozotocin diabetic mice [11].

Biological context of West Indies

• Samples from the West Indies, Europe, and North America had a nucleotide diversity lower than that of African populations at vermilion and show nonequilibrium haplotype distributions at both vermilion and G6pd, consistent with a hypothesis of recent bottleneck and possibly also admixture in the history of these populations [12].
• Stool samples were transported in formalin to the Department of Microbiology, The University of the West Indies, Jamaica, for analysis using the formalin-ether concentration and Ziehl-Neelsen techniques [13].
• Epidemiology of vitiligo in the French West Indies (Isle of Martinique) [14].

Associations of West Indies with chemical compounds

• A new case of a defect in red cell pyrimidine 5'-nucleotide (P5N) activity was found in a large family from Guadeloupe in the West Indies [15].
• Effects of irrigation on appearance and survival of infective larvae of goat gastro-intestinal nematodes in Guadeloupe (French West Indies) [16].
• They have also colonized groups of Atlantic islands five times: a single invasion of the West Indies and three of the Canary islands, one of which then went on to invade the Cape Verde archipelago [17].
• More than 400 faecal samples (from normal and malnourished children, and from mixed-age participants in a field survey of the Turks and Caicos Islands) were each mixed with 2-5 mg of sodium azide powder and stored in 2 or 4 ml autoanalyser cups at ambient tropical temperature [18].
• The outcome is described of 48 entrants to a postgraduate degree course (DM) in Internal Medicine established at the University of the West Indies in 1974 [19].

Gene context of West Indies

• RESULTS: We identified a homozygous 4-base-pair insertion in exon 5 of SPINK5, which introduces a premature termination codon and appears to be a common mutation among West Indies islanders [20].
• In a new approach to these features, we sequenced the entire env gene of 65 HTLV-I isolates originating from Gabon, French Guiana, West Indies, and Iran, such isolates representing all major HTLVI phylums but the Australo-Melanesian one [21].
• Allelic frequency variations at the MDH-1 locus within Schistosoma mansoni strains from Guadeloupe (French West Indies): ecological interpretation [22].
• Two predominant types recognized by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) accounted for the majority of the GS-MRSA in different mainland hospitals, both differing from the predominant type observed in the French West Indies [23].
• A series of 171 blacks from Trinidad, West Indies, was studied with respect to haemoglobin types, serum protein systems (Tf and Gc subtypes) and red cell enzyme types (AcPh, 6-PGD, AK, EsD, GLO and PGM1) [24].

Analytical, diagnostic and therapeutic context of West Indies

• Blood samples from 132 unrelated Sbeta+-thalassaemia patients attending the MRC Sickle Cell Unit at the University of the West Indies were analysed by amplification refractory mutation system (ARMS) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or sequencing to determine the nature and frequencies of the underlying beta-thalassaemia mutations [25].
• Studies on an isolated West Indies population. III. Epidemiologic study of sensorineural hearing loss [26].
• METHODS: We studied the prevalence of vitiligo in patients affected by leprosy by performing a retrospective study between 1978 and 1999 in the French West Indies (Martinique) [27].
• Complementary medicine seminar for medical undergraduates at the University of the West Indies, Mona [28].
• Prostate cancer at the University Hospital of the West Indies in Jamaica. A clinico-pathological profile at the time of needle biopsy diagnosis [29].

References