• Pancreatitis
• Mutations
• Trypsin

We read with great interest the article by Paliwal et al 1 reporting the identification of novel missense variants in the chymotrypsin C (CTRC) gene in patients with tropical pancreatitis and idiopathic chronic pancreatitis (CP) in India. Because there might be geographical differences in the genetics of pancreatitis, we conducted screening of the CTRC gene in Japanese patients with CP. All the eight exons in the CTRC gene were directly sequenced in 506 patients with CP (244 alcoholic, 206 idiopathic, 35 hereditary and 21 familial) and 274 healthy controls as previously described.1 This study was approved by the ethics committee of Tohoku University School of Medicine (article #2012-1-158). We identified five missense variants in patients with CP and one in controls (table 1 …