Frequency of the CCR5Δ32 allele in Brazilians: A study in colorectal cancer and in HTLV-I infection

Abstract

The identification of a 32-bp deletion in the cc-chemokine receptor-5 gene (CCR5Δ32 allele) that renders homozygous individuals highly resistant to HIV infection has prompted worldwide investigations of the frequency of the CCR5Δ32 allele in regional populations. It is important to ascertain if CCR5Δ32 is a factor to be considered in the overall epidemiology of HIV in individual populations. With this in mind we determined the CCR5Δ32 allele frequency in a large sample (907 individuals) of the southeastern Brazilian urban population, stratified as follows: 322 healthy unrelated individuals, 354 unselected colorectal cancer patients, and 229 blood donors. The three groups displayed essentially identical allelic frequencies of CCR5Δ32 and pairwise comparisons did not show significant differences. Thus, our results can be pooled to provide a reliable estimate of the CCR5Δ32 allele frequency in the southeastern Brazil of 0.053 ± 0.005. The blood donors comprised 50 HTLV-I serologically negative individuals, 115 non-symptomatic individuals HTLV-I positive by ELISA but with indeterminate Western blot results, 49 healthy blood donors HTLV-I positive both at ELISA and Western blot and 15 patients with clinical spinal cord disease (HAM). A suggestive trend was observed, with the CCR5Δ32 frequencies decreasing progres-sively in these four categories. However, when we applied Fischer's exact test no significant differences emerged. We believe that further studies in larger cohorts should be performed to ascertain whether the CCR5Δ32 allele influences the chance of becoming infected or developing clinical symptoms of HTLV-I infection.