Communicated by Arupa GangulyThe amount of residual F8 (FVIII:C) determines the clinical severity of hemophilia A. Recently, we showed that the mutation detection rate in severely affected male patients (FVIII:Co1% of normal) is virtually 100% when testing for the common intron 22-/intron 1-inversions and big deletions, followed by genomic sequencing of the F8 gene. Here we report on the spectrum of mutations and their distribution throughout the F8 gene sequence in 135 patients with moderate (n 5 23) or mild (n 5 112) hemophilia A. In contrast to the severe form of the disorder, analysis on the genomic level failed to detect the molecular defect in 4% of the moderately and in 12% of the mildly affected patients. A total of 36 of the mutations identified in this study are novel. The vast majority of the detected changes were missense. The newly detected amino acid substitutions were scored for potential distant or local conformational changes and influence on molecular stability for every single F8 domain with available structures, using homology modeling. Two molecular changes in the promoter region of the factor VIII gene (c.-112G4A and -219C4T), affecting the core segment (minimal promoter) were detected in two patients with mild hemophilia A. To our knowledge this is the first report on promoter mutations in the F8 gene. Hum Mutat 28(1), [54][55][56][57][58][59][60] 2007.

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Aims Recent studies have reported an association between the platelet glycoprotein (GP) Ia C807T polymorphism and myocardial infarction, whereas other studies have reported contradictory results concerning the platelet GPIIIa PlA1/A2 polymorphism. In most of these studies the patients were older than 45 years. Thus we decided to examine both genotypes in 287 men who had their first myocardial infarction before age 45, and a group of 138 healthy controls. Methods and Results The frequency of T807 allele carriers was similar among myocardial infarction patients and among controls (54.6% vs 62.3%; odds ratio (OR) 0.73; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.47-1.12). The frequency of PlA2 carriers was higher in cases than in controls (26.5% vs 15.2%; OR 1.65; CI, 1.09-2.54). After performing a logistic regression analysis, taking into account other cardiovascular risk factors, this difference did not remain significant. The combination of the risk alleles of both genotypes had no major effect on the myocardial infarction risk. Conclusions The GPIIIa PlA2 allele is not independently associated with the risk of premature myocardial infarction. The T807 allele of the GPIa gene alone or in combination with the PlA2 allele had no major effect on premature myocardial infarction risk.

The prothrombin gene mutation is a new risk factor for thrombotic complications both on hemodialysis and after renal transplantation. It may be useful to screen for this disorder in the pretransplant thrombophilia work-up.