UNLABELLED Patients with chronic hepatitis C can have variable clinical progression. Hepatic histological alterations appear to be milder in asymptomatic subjects who have persistently normal ALT levels. AIMS To evaluate the severity of histological liver alterations in blood donors with normal and elevated ALT levels. METHODS We evaluated volunteer blood donors from the main blood bank of ...

The major obstacle to curing HIV infection is the persistence of cells with intact proviruses that can produce replication-competent virus. This HIV reservoir is believed to exist primarily in CD4+ T-cells and is stable despite years of suppressive antiretroviral therapy. A potential mechanism for HIV persistence is clonal expansion of infected cells, but how often such clones carry replication...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the risk of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection in healthy blood donors in Thailand MATERIAL AND METHOD We performed a case-control study of 435 HCV-seropositive blood donors and 894 HCV-seronegative blood donors as controls. The study was done with direct interview regarding demographic characteristics and risk factors. Odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (C...

Two species of microsporidia, Encephalitozoon hellem and Encephalitozoon intestinalis, were isolated from AIDS patients and cultured in green monkey kidney cells. A spore germination assay and a cultured-cell infection assay were used to test the efficacy of candidate antiparasitic agents. The calcium channel blocker nifedipine, metronidazole, and two nitric oxide (NO) donors, S-nitroso-N-acety...

BACKGROUND National legislation in Pakistan regulating blood banks has been introduced several times, but has never been passed. To support provincial-level efforts to develop legislation we conducted a study to evaluate blood-banking practices in Karachi, Pakistan, to identify areas that could be improved. METHODS Thirty-seven blood banks were randomly selected from a list of 87 Karachi bloo...

Background Increasing immunosuppressant consumption and expenditure is a quite a challenge in transplantation medicine. The aim of the study was to characterize the utilization and expenditure of tacrolimus, backbone, and standard of care in immunosuppression regimen in Serbian solid organ transplant recipients. Methods This study was performed as retrospective cross-sectional study during a ...

In a multicenter cooperative study, an enzyme immunoassay (EIA) using purified antigen of lymphadenopathy-associated virus was compared with radioimmune precipitation (RIP) for detection of antibody to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 634 patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome or related conditions, 687 apparently healthy persons at risk for HIV infection, 93 controls with cancer...

NADPH-cytochrome P450 reductase (CPR) and cytochrome-b(5) (b(5)) together with NADH-b(5) reductase (b(5)R) play important roles in cytochrome P450 3A-mediated drug metabolism via electron transfer. However, it is not clear whether variability in expression of these accessory proteins contributes to the known interindividual variability in CYP3A activity. CPR and b(5) were measured in human live...

Although the majority of patients with Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) are cured initial therapy, in 85–90% early stage and 70–80% advanced-stage disease cases, relapse remains a major problem. Autologous stem-cell transplantation (auto-HCT) after salvage chemotherapy is currently considered to be standard care for who first-line or whom treatment fails. The curative capacity auto-HCT has been improving ...