introduction: helicobacter pylori, as an etiologic cause of peptic ulcers and gastric cancer, should be tested and treated. the true state of infection can only be detected by isolation of gastric biopsies through the invasive method of gastroscopy. however, there are several non-invasive methods for detection of infection, the most common of which is serology. methods: here we have evaluated t...

conclusions serum ada activity with high specificity percentage may be a useful alternative test in restricted resource areas to rule out diagnosis of ptb. however, serum ada activity is not a useful tool for tb diagnosis. mean serum ada level in the ptb group was clearly higher than the mean serum ada in the other three groups. mean serum ada was 26 iu/l in ptb patients, 19.48 iu/l in patients...

BACKGROUND So far, the validity of urine dipslides has been studied only under optimal conditions, which may not reflect the situation in daily practice. OBJECTIVE We studied the validity of the urine dipslide as performed under daily practice conditions and assessed the influence of the incubation period (24 h versus 48 h) on validity. METHODS Fresh urine samples of patients with signs/sym...

conclusions with regard to the ease of urine sample preparation and the 100% specificity the pcr method, performing urine pcr could be used as a diagnostic aid in ptb cases obtaining sputum samples is problematic. results results of the current study indicated that 48 (62.3%) patients out of 77 had a positive sputum culture. urine cultures and acid-fast smears were negative. urine pcr-tb was po...

background: air pollution has been a serious public health threat worldwide. it has been linked to pulmonary and cardiovascular diseases but is also believed to contribute to air-pollution-mediated cardiometabolic disease such as diabetes. we investigated the relationship between type 2 diabetes mellitus (dm2) and air pollution in densely developed urban settings in south korea, using national ...

background: the present study assesses independent predictors of clinically important traumatic brain injury (citbi) in order to design a prognostic rule for identification of high risk children with mild head injury. materials and methods: in a retrospective cross-sectional study, 3,199 children with mild traumatic brain injury (tbi) brought to emergency ward of three hospitals in tehran, iran...

we assessed the lower urinary tract symptoms (luts) in prostatic cancer patients and investigated the sensitivity and specificity of international prostate symptom score (ipss) in the screening of these patients. a total number of 132 prostatic cancer patients as the case group who were confirmed by the pathologists and 101 noncancerous men as the control group, aged 50 or older, responded to a...

as described in the first part of this article, evidence based medicine (ebm) is a growing part of medical practice which emphasizes on the best evidence. finding this evidence by formulating an answerable question and searching strategies were described in the first part of this review. in this part, appraising the retrieved article (with the main focus on the diagnostic studies) and applying ...

background: magnetic resonance cholangiography (mrc) has gained popularity for diagnosing primary sclerosing cholangitis (psc). we determined the accuracy of mrc compared with endoscopic retrograde cholangiography (erc) for diagnosing psc. materials and methods: this retrospective case-control study was conducted on patients referred to an outpatient gastroenterology clinic from 2001 to 2013. p...