A 32-year-old man with an unremarkable medical history presented to the ambulatory clinic with complaints of nonlocalized abdominal pain. The results of a physical examination were unremarkable. The results obtained from liver, pancreatic, and renal testing were within the reference intervals, and the results of both a fecal occult blood test and an investigation for parasites in the stool were...

Historically, we have made assumptions. If a screening test for cancer decreases death from the target disease, and there is no obvious signal that any other type of death is increased, we have assumed that overall mortality (OM) is improved. In other words, the heuristic goes, if the trial’s power were larger, we would see this benefit. This reasoning buttresses nearly all widely used screenin...

Background: The majority of col-orectal cancers arise from benign neoplasms (adenomatous polyps). Adenomas of 1 cm or more in diameter confer a higher risk of col-orectal cancer than smaller ones. The goals of colorectal cancer screening in asymptomatic individuals are to detect cancers and to identify and remove adenoma-tous polyps. In 2001 the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care end...

Background and study aims: Chronic hemodialysis patients are susceptible to a lot of complications. Gastrointestinal bleeding is one of the most serious and important complications in these patients result from many contributing factors like chronic uremia, stress and drugs. The present study is concerned with assessment the magnitude of occult gastrointestinal bleeding in chronic hemodialysis ...

Occult hepatitis C infection is regarded as a new entity that should be considered when diagnosing patients with a liver disease of unknown origin. Using an ultrasensitive real-time PCR assay, we demonstrated that occult hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection cannot be found in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of patients with cryptogenic liver diseases, HCV--associated systemic vasculitis, or con...

BACKGROUND The FMR1 premutation is associated with overt primary ovarian insufficiency (POI). However, its prevalence in women with occult POI (i.e. menstrual cycles, but impaired ovarian response) has not been examined. We hypothesized that both the FMR1 premutation and intermediate allele is more frequent in infertile women with occult POI than in controls, and that a repeat length cutoff mig...