BACKGROUND Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is a life-saving bridging procedure in patients with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Official indications for ECMO are unclear for immunocompromised and HIV-positive patients affected by severe hypoxemia. Uncertainties are related to prognosis and efficacy of treatment of the underlying disease. However, the care of patien...

AIM We investigated the effect of the new tumour-, node-, metastasis- (TNM) classification on predicting and discriminating gastric cancer patient prognosis using the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program. PATIENTS AND METHODS From the SEER-database we retrieved gastric cancer patients with a primary adenocarcinoma, of Caucasian or Asian ethnici...

There is great interest in the use of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and linkage disequilibrium (LD) analysis to localize human disease genes. The results suggest that the human genome, including the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), consists largely of 5- to 200-kb blocks of sequence fixity between which random recombination occurs. Direct determination of MHC haplotypes from fam...

PURPOSE This study compared in vivo kinematic differences between Caucasian and South Korean patients after a posterior-substituting total knee arthroplasty (PS-TKA). MATERIALS AND METHODS In vivo motions of 9 Caucasian and 13 South Korean knees with a PS-TKA during weight bearing single leg lunge were determined using a dual fluoroscopic imaging technique. Normalized tibiofemoral condylar mo...

We evaluated whether the obesity-associated years of life lost (YLL) have decreased over calendar time. We implemented a meta-analysis including only studies with two or more serial body mass index (BMI) assessments at different calendar years. For each BMI category (normal weight: BMI 18.5 to <25 [reference]; overweight: BMI 25 to <30; grade 1 obesity: BMI 30 to <35; and grade 2-3 obesity: BMI...

Lymphocyte subset reference values used to monitor infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, or other immunological disorders in healthy children in Cameroon, are lacking. Values for Caucasian cohorts are already being utilized for clinical decisions but could be inappropriate for African populations. We report here the immunological profile for children aged from birth th...

OBJECTIVE Sleep quality and ethnicity are related to a host of general health outcomes including the experience of pain, yet it remains unclear whether poor sleep quality and ethnicity might interactively affect pain catastrophizing and laboratory-evoked acute pain reports. The current study examined the cross-sectional associations of subjective sleep quality, ethnicity, and their interaction ...

The HLA-B12 antigen is significantly increased in Caucasian patients with Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS) with ocular complications, while HLA-A*0206 is strongly associated with Japanese patients with SJS/toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) with ocular complications. There are strong ethnic differences in the association between HLA and SJS/TEN. Regarding the association between HLA and drug-induce...

Gastric cancer is the most common cancer and the most frequent cause of cancer death worldwide. Several studies have identified the role of thymidylate synthase (TS) 5'- and 3'-UTR and gastric cancer susceptibility; however, the results still remain inconclusive. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to reinvestigate this correlation. In the present study, online databases were searched to retr...

Activating transcription factor 6 (ATF6) is located within the region of linkage to type 2 diabetes on chromosome 1q21-q23 and is a key activator of the endoplasmic reticulum stress response. We evaluated 78 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) spanning >213 kb in 95 people, from which we selected 64 SNPs for evaluation in 191 Caucasian case subjects from Utah and between 165 and 188 control ...