Stroke is the second leading cause of disability around the globe

Stroke is a second potential threat worldwide after infectious diseases such as lung or diarrheic infections, tuberculosis (TB), Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), and malaria. It is also considered the second most common root cause of disability around the globe. Stroke is a major health problem that is characterized by sudden disability among adults. In classical risk factors, differences in genetic susceptibility have been reported.

World Health Organization (WHO) stated that “stroke is defined by rapidly developing clinical signs of focal or global disturbance of cerebral function, lasting more than 24 h or leading to death, with no apparent cause other than that of vascular origin. The severity of sequelae is dependent on the affected brain region, the functions it controls, and the duration of the stroke”. According to WHO, there are two main types of stroke, i.e., ischemic stroke (DALYs) and hemorrhagic stroke (ICH).

The research published in the American Journal of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with the authorship of Moustapha Djite et al., 2020 reported that the ubiquity of stroke is estimated at 45.78% of neurological disorders in Senegal that requires hospitalization, and it is responsible for nearly 2/3 of mortality at the Clinic of Neurology of Fann University Teaching Hospital.

About these figures, the need of the hour is to find out the traditional risk factors and the involvement of genetic factors associated with this vascular disease, leading to an effective and sustainable prevention policy that is purely based on epidemiological findings. This urged the researchers to study the polymorphism of the haptoglobin (Hp) gene as a factor predisposing to stroke onset and secondly to evaluate the hyperuricemia as an associated risk factor.

This analytical case-control study was carried out at the Fann National University Hospital Center in Dakar from 01 January 2018 to 30 June 2019. For this purpose, 46 stroke patients and 46 controls matched by sex and age ± 2 years were selected for studying the genotype of Hp gene and hyperuricemia.

Moustapha Djite said that “the results of this study exhibited that the Hp2 allele and the Hp2-2 genotype were significantly associated with stroke patients (36.96%) compared to control subjects (17.39%) and a statistically significant difference was found with p = 0.002. The hyperuricemia is an additional risk factor whose frequency was found higher in stroke subjects of Hp2-2 genotype”.

In a nutshell, this study’s results showed that Hp polymorphism and hyperuricemia play a vital role in stroke pathogenesis, which may be beneficial for better patient management. This study will help the researchers discover more about the critical areas of genomics and metabolic biochemistry.