Abstract:
This work is presented in two parts;- firstly, the acctylation pattern of sulphamethazine (SMZ)in laprosy patients of ibo origin and secondly, the assessment of the degree of similarity or lack of it, between the esterases that hydrolyse procaine and acetylcholine in plasma. Inthe first part, it was found that both control subjects and leprosy patients showed a bimodal frequency distribution in respect of the percent acetylated SMZ in both their plasma and urine. of the 76 leprosy patients studied, 39 were classified as "slow" acetylation, with an estimate of gene frequency, q=0.72 as against 32 (q=0.72) in the 61 control subjects the difference between the phenotypic distribution of these patients and the control subject was not statistically significant (p>0.05). Although laprosy disease dose not appear to influence the phenotypic distributios, statistical analysis shows that the difference between the means of parcent acetylation in the slow acetylator phenotypesin the patients and control subject is statistically significant (t=4.86, D.F.=69, p<0.02), implicating a posssible involvement of an intrinsic factor probally mediated bythe disease
