AIMS To examine the level of microbial colonisation in intravenous fluids after 24 hours of use in an acute care setting to determine the necessity of changing infusate bags on a time-related basis. BACKGROUND Catheter-related bloodstream infections are a serious and life-threatening complication of intravascular devices. Colonised intravenous fluids are one potential source of infection; how...

......................................................................................................................................... iii Table of

OBJECTIVES To establish baseline concentrations of plasminogen activators and their inhibitors in normal knee synovial fluids, and to compare them with well characterised osteoarthritis (OA) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) knee fluids. METHODS A total of 26 normal subjects, 71 patients with OA, and 17 patients with RA underwent knee aspiration. Patients with OA were subclassified according to p...

OBJECTIVES We investigated how often intravenous fluids have been delivered during physician-led prehospital treatment of patients with hypotensive trauma in the UK and which fluids were given. These data were used to estimate the potential national requirement for prehospital blood products (PHBP) if evidence from ongoing trials were to report clinical superiority. SETTING The Regional Explo...

analyzing the synovial fluid is one of the common methods to diagnose the articular problems to detect the stage and express the prognosis. such gross, cytological, and biochemical analysis of synovial fluids can aid in the diagnosis of various joint diseases. objectives: normal values for synovial fluid in the camels have been described previously; however, there are no reports regarding conce...

pathological changes within an organ can be reflected as proteomic patterns in biological fluids such as plasma, serum, and urine. the surface-enhanced laser desorption and ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (seldi-tof ms) has been used to generate proteomic profiles from biological fluids. mass spectrometry yields redundant noisy data that the most data points are irrelevant features ...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Conclusive studies of small bowel bacterial overgrowth in patients with HIV-1 infection are limited. The relation was therefore determined between the quantity and species of bacteria in the proximal small intestine of HIV-1 infected patients and the presence of diarrhoea, gastric acidity, severity of immune deficiency, and clinical outcome. METHODS Bacteria in the duodenal fl...

Diagnostic tools for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) currently involve subjective neuropsychological testing and specialized brain imaging techniques. While definitive diagnosis requires a pathological brain evaluation at autopsy, neurodegenerative changes are believed to begin years before the clinical presentation of cognitive decline. Therefore, there is an essent...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Contrast-induced nephropathy is one of the few preventable forms of acute kidney injury. Several pharmacologic agents have been evaluated for the prevention of contrast-induced nephropathy, yet disappointingly, few have been shown conclusively to reduce the risk for this condition. A series of studies have demonstrated that volume expansion, particularly with intraveno...

Previous studies of in utero-infection with the human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) were focused on HCMVseropositive women. Here, we assessed the clinical relevance of HCMV infection in normal pregnancies. In a prospective cohort study, amniotic fluids from 403 pregnant women undergoing amniocentesis for non-virological reasons were tested for HCMV DNA (nested PCR analysis of amniotic fluids), and ser...