PURPOSE To identify the Acinetobacter baumannii infection among transfusion dependent thalassemia patients. METHODS A quantitative approach was employed to assess Acinetobacter baumannii infection in transfusion dependent thalassemia patients. Samples were collected from 916 patients, which have shown bacterial growth on MacConkey and blood agar culture media. A. baumannii strains were identi...

Median sternotomy is the most common method of access to the heart and great vessels in cardiac surgical procedures. However, particularly in obese and diabetic patients, complications such as dehiscence, osteomyelitis, mediastinitis and superficial wound infection or fistula formation may be encountered. To overcome these complications, some alternative surgical techniques and surgical equipme...

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES We present the characteristics and outcomes of heart transplantation in Spain since it was first performed in 1984. METHODS A descriptive analysis of the characteristics of recipients, donors, the surgical procedure, and the outcomes of heart transplantations performed in Spain until 31 December 2014. RESULTS In 2014, 266 procedures were performed, making a time ...

The prevalence of the currently known Acinetobacter species and related trends of antimicrobial resistance in a Dutch university hospital were studied. Between 1999 and 2006, Acinetobacter isolates from clinical samples were collected prospectively. Isolates were analyzed by amplified fragment length polymorphism fingerprinting. For species identification, a profile similarity cutoff level of 5...

We evaluated three commercial colistin susceptibility testing methods using 213 bloodstream Acinetobacter isolates identified by gene sequencing. Compared to the agar dilution reference method, excellent categorical agreements (both 99.1%) were observed using Vitek 2 and Etest, compared to 87.3% (95.7% for Acinetobacter baumannii and 80.7% for non-baumannii Acinetobacter isolates) using MicroScan.

BACKGROUND In the setting of a large endemic of Acinetobacter baumannii infections, treatment of those due to carbapenem-resistant strains, susceptible only to colistin, has become a major problem in our hospital during the past years. Successful results have been reported using colistin, but clinical experience with this antibiotic is limited. In our experimental studies using these strains in...

Introduction Surgery is a frequent health care intervention with an estimated 6 million non-cardiac surgical procedures performed every year in the United States, with progressive growth in the number of procedures noted each subsequent year(1). Preoperative medical evaluations have been a cornerstone of pre-surgical care planning and patient management. The clinical providers who carry out the...

In 1977, Goldman stated that elective surgery should not be performed in patients with signs of heart failure.1 Things have changed considerably in the more than 30 years since the publication of his well-known index. Today, heart failure is no longer necessarily considered a contra-indication to surgical intervention, although it should be carefully evaluated as a risk factor for complications...

This study briefly reviews the heart abnormalities in diverse intracranial pathologies, including strokes, spontaneous and traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage and intracranial hemorrhage, and presents the results of a one-year prospective study of heart abnormalities in patients with moderate to severe head injuries and subarachnoid hemorrhage. Different abnormalities such as: QT -interval, T...

We previously showed that the opportunistic nosocomial pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii is able to sense and respond to light via BlsA, a BLUF (Blue-Light-sensing Using FAD)-domain photoreceptor protein. Here, we extend our previous studies showing that light regulation is not restricted to A. baumannii, but rather widespread within the genus Acinetobacter. First, we found that blue light modul...