BACKGROUND Human pathogens that can cause infertility may also affect sperm count and quality. Viral infections can be considered as direct and/or indirect cause of male factor infertility. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to investigate the prevalence of herpes simplex virus in the semen of infertile men attending the Avicenna Infertility Clinic, and to compare it with the herpes virus serology result...

Lyme disease (LD), the most common tick-borne disease in North America, is believed to be caused exclusively by Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto and is usually diagnosed by clinical evaluation and serologic assays. As reported previously in a peer-reviewed article, a 13-year-old boy living in the Northeast of the USA was initially diagnosed with LD based on evaluation of his clinical presenta...

We review the significance of the Widal agglutination test in the diagnosis of typhoid fever. Over 100 years since its introduction as a serologic means of detecting the presence of typhoid fever, the Widal test continues to be plagued with controversies involving the quality of the antigens used and interpretation of the result, particularly in endemic areas. Areas of concern with clinical and...

Pangborn (14) has shown that an antigen for the serologic diagnosis of syphilis can be prepared by the addition of lecithin and cholesterol to a phospholipid obtained from beef heart. Tests for syphilis using these so-called cardiolipin antigens have given few false positive readings in at least one disease, namely, malaria (7, 8, 15, 16). In leprosy, on the other hand, Rein and his coworkers (...

Diagnosis of patients with minimal active tuberculosis (TB) is difficult, as there is no single test with high sensitivity and specificity. The yield and clinical utility of a combination of diagnostic tests were prospectively studied among 500 consecutive patients referred for sputum induction for diagnosis of possible active TB. Patients underwent sputum induction, chest X-ray, tuberculin tes...

methods: in a retrospective descriptive study, medical records of 204 hip fractured patients with the age of 60 or older who were admitted to the department of orthopedics was considered regarding routine laboratory tests. predictive values of these tests were assessed using receiver operating characteristic curve (roc).  results: the incidence of death due to hip fracture was 24%. the mortalit...

Diagnostic notes are not peer reviewed ince the development of the indirect-fluorescent antibody (IFA) test in 1992, serologic profiling has been extremely valuable in improving the understanding of PRRS virus (PRRSV) patterns of transmission within infected farms. The IFA test detects IgG antibodies and indicates infection, not protection. IFA titers are initially detected 7–10 days post-infec...

A commercially available dot immunoassay that employs the lipoarabinomannan antigen was evaluated for the serologic diagnosis of tuberculosis. The test showed a high specificity (100%); however, its sensitivity was low (18.5%). Antibodies to lipoarabinomannan were detected in the sera of 7 of 71 patients with newly acquired tuberculosis and in sera of 10 of 21 patients with relapse tuberculosis...