Basic Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Jun 21, 2015; 21(23): 7191-7196
Published online Jun 21, 2015. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v21.i23.7191
β-2 Adrenergic receptor gene polymorphism and response to propranolol in cirrhosis
De-Run Kong, Jin-Guang Wang, Bin Sun, Ming-Quan Wang, Chen Chen, Fang-Fang Yu, Jian-Ming Xu
De-Run Kong, Jin-Guang Wang, Bin Sun, Chen Chen, Fang-Fang Yu, Jian-Ming Xu, Department of Gastroenterology, the first Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei 230022, Anhui Province, China
Ming-Quan Wang, Department of Radiology, the first Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei 230022, Anhui Province, China
Author contributions: Kong DR, Wang JG, Sun B and Wang MQ contributed equally to this work; Wang JG and Kong DR performed the majority of experiments and analyzed the data; Sun B and Wang MQ performed the molecular investigations; Chen C and Yu FF participated equally in treatment of patients; Kong DR and Xu JM designed and coordinated the research; Kong DR and Wang JG wrote the paper.
Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 81271736.
Ethics approval: This study was approval from the Ethics Committee of Anhui Medical University.
Conflict-of-interest: We declare that we have no financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that can inappropriately influence our work.
Data sharing: Technical appendix, statistical code, and dataset could be available from the corresponding author at kdr168@sohu.com. Participants gave informed consent for data sharing.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: De-Run Kong, MD, Professor, Department of Gastroenterology, the first Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, No. 218 Jixi Road, Hefei 230022, Anhui Province, China. kongderun@ahmu.edu.cn
Telephone: +86-551-62922105 Fax: +86-551-65120742
Received: October 27, 2014
Peer-review started: October 28, 2014
First decision: December 26, 2014
Revised: January 26, 2015
Accepted: February 11, 2015
Article in press: February 11, 2015
Published online: June 21, 2015
Core Tip

Core tip: The study explored the influence of β-2 adrenergic receptor (β2-AR) polymorphism and the response of esophageal variceal pressure to chronic treatment with propranolol. The originality was that we associated the polymorphism to the measurement of variceal pressure and considered the response to propranolol administration. We found that the variceal pressure response to propranolol was associated with β2-AR gene polymorphisms, and that the patients with the Gly16-Glu/Gln27 homozygotes seem to benefit more from propranolol therapy.