We found significant difference in average number of the HRCs between controls and each of the patients groups, with decreased number in the patients (LC = 5.86 + 0.25; TB = 6.12 + 0.28; control = 7.06 + 0.26), the total cumulative %2 dif­ference (p <0.001) and frequency distribution (p = 0.0027). The list and degree of the significance found for each of the studied HRCs in patients and controls are shown in the Table 1. The table also illustrates the values of the interpopulation fixation index (Fst) in the frequency trend of the recessive phenotypes in the analyzed groups. The particular analysis suggests that the both patients' groups rep­resent different samples when compared to healthy controls. The difference is more expressed in LC patients, whose retreat toward lower degrees of ho-mozygosity is more evident. The two patient groups also differ between themselves, but the difference is not significant in terms of the majority of the param­eters investigated. Turkey's test and non paramet­ric variance analysis confirmed this (t _{C: TB} = 2.47, p <0.05; t _{C: LC} = 3.35, p <0.01; t _{TB: LC} = 0.63, p >0.05). The HRCs frequencies in the three analyzed groups are shown in Figure 1. Homozygous-recessive char­acters frequency variation ranged from three to10 in TB patients, from two to 11 in LC patients, and from three to 12 in controls. The frequency distribu­tion is shown in Figure 2.

The frequencies of ABO blood types in the group of LC patients were similar to the average propor­tion in the Serbian population, while the frequency of blood type O was significantly decreased in the TB patients group (p <0.05). In this latter group, the proportion of blood type B was increased, but not significantly (Figure 3).