• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: inuit
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.589.5766; http://www.clinchem.org/content/45/8/1285.full.pdf

susceptible to certain infections than whites. For example, interindividual differences in susceptibility to infection with C. pneumoniae have been suggested to be determined by genetic variation in MBL (5, 8). Several lines of exper-imental evidence have implicated infection with C. pneu-moniae as a factor that contributes to atherosclerosis (8, 12). If the MBL allele frequencies in the Inuit actually conferred resistance to C. pneumoniae infection, this might explain in part their apparent resistance to cardiovascular disease. Alternatively, the associations may have been related to linkage disequilibrium with other structural differences in MBL or at a linked locus, which would have provided the mechanistic basis for the associations. The high prevalence of the MBL A allele and the low prevalence of the MBL B, C, and D alleles among the Inuit