University Publications

Introduction: Patients with end stage renal disease (ESRD) have the higher rate of mortality than the general population. Cardiovascular disease, a frequent complication in these patients, is a major cause of the mortality. Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase gene polymorphism determinates the level of homocysteine among other factors and may be consider as one of the cardiovascular risk factor. Several studies have shown that high levels of homocysteine are associated with high risk of cardiovascular disease. The main objective of this study was to examine the distribution of genotype frequencies of C677T MTHFR among ESRD Sudanese patients on maintenance hemodialysis. Methodology: This case-control study was included 72 samples, genetically unrelated 43 cases collected from two dialysis centers in governmental hospitals in Khartoum and healthy matched 30 controls (matched in age, ethnicity and population), which were collected from community. Blood samples were collected in EDTA containers and genomic DNA was extracted using phenol chloroform method, then C677T MTHFR polymorphism detection was carried out by PCR-RFLP technique. Results: Sudanese ESRD patients who visiting hemodialysis centers involved in the present study have shown 0% frequencies for the MTHFR gene polymorphism C677T. This indicates that all patients were carried the wild type genotype (CC); no mutant allele (T) was found. Conclusion: The results obtained in this study revealed that the C677T single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) for the MTHFR gene found to be very rare among these patients