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H. pylori is known to cause severe gastric diseases, including peptic ulcers and gastric cancers, and a link has also been suggested with iron-deficiency anemia (IDA). However, little is known about the pathogenesis of H. pylori-associated IDA. In the present study, to determine whether H. pylori strains are correlated with the prevalence of IDA, we analyzed and compared the sequences of the napA genes encoding a bacterioferritin-like protein in H. pylori strains. A total of 20 H. pylori strains were isolated from antral biopsies of patients with and without IDA, and the napA genes amplified from the genomic DNA were sequenced. A comparison of the deduced amino acid sequences for NapA revealed two sites with major variations. At residue 70, five out of the 12 non-IDA strains (41.7%) contained serine, while only one of the 8 IDA strains (12.5%) contained serine, indicating a significantly higher frequency of serine in the non-IDA strains. In addition, the NapA proteins from all 17 Western strains available on Web sites were found to contain serine residues at this position. Meanwhile, the other major variation was located at residue 73, where all eight IDA strains (100%) contained leucine, while this was only true for eight of the 12 non-IDA strains (66.7%). Therefore, these results indicated that the strains within each group were more genetically related to each other than to strains in the other group. When the expression level of the napA genes in the H. pylori strains was measured using RT-PCR, no significant difference was observed between the two groups, suggesting a similar intensity for the inflammatory responses induced by the NapA protein among the strains. Consequently, when taken together, the present data suggest that the occurrence of H. pylori-associated IDA may be partly determined by the infecting H. pylori strain, and the non-IDA strains are more closely related to Western strains than the IDA strains.
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