Use of terbinafine for tinea in Australian Aboriginal communities in the Top End.

Tinea of the skin and nails is a common problem in remote Aboriginal communities of the Top End of Australia. A retrospective study was performed on data collected from 104 patients from several indigenous communities. Worksheets were filled in by district medical officers and rural general practitioners, detailing the extent of the tinea. Patients were prescribed between 4 and 12 weeks of 250 mg daily oral terbinafine. Fifty-two patients were followed up, with 45 having a good response to treatment (87%) and with 22 of these patients having full clearance of tinea (42%). A prospective study with 44 subjects was performed. The extent of the tinea was documented and fungal scrapings/clippings were taken. Forty subjects were recruited and given oral terbinafine (2-12 weeks depending on skin/nail involvement) or topical terbinafine if oral treatment was contraindicated. Twenty-five of the 40 (63%) subjects were reviewed. Twenty-three (92%) subjects that were followed up improved clinically, with 8/25 (32%) clearing completely. Twenty (80%) of followed-up patients complied fully with treatment. Terbinafine was found to be a well-tolerated and effective treatment of tinea of the skin and nails

Genome-wide association study identifies three new melanoma susceptibility loci

We report a genome-wide association study for melanoma that was conducted by the GenoMEL Consortium. Our discovery phase included 2,981 individuals with melanoma and 1,982 study-specific control individuals of European ancestry, as well as an additional 6,426 control subjects from French or British populations, all of whom were genotyped for 317,000 or 610,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Our analysis replicated previously known melanoma susceptibility loci. Seven new regions with at least one SNP with P < 10−5 and further local imputed or genotyped support were selected for replication using two other genome-wide studies (from Australia and Texas, USA). Additional replication came from case-control series from the UK and The Netherlands. Variants at three of the seven loci replicated at P < 10−3: an SNP in ATM (rs1801516, overall P = 3.4 × 10−9), an SNP in MX2 (rs45430, P = 2.9 × 10−9) and an SNP adjacent to CASP8 (rs13016963, P = 8.6 × 10−10). A fourth locus near CCND1 remains of potential interest, showing suggestive but inconclusive evidence of replication (rs1485993, overall P = 4.6 × 10−7 under a fixed-effects model and P = 1.2 × 10−3 under a random-effects model). These newly associated variants showed no association with nevus or pigmentation phenotypes in a large British case-control series