INTRODUCTION Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a major cause of mortality in systemic sclerosis (SSc). Screening guidelines for PAH recommend multiple investigations, including annual echocardiography, which together have low specificity and may not be cost-effective. We sought to evaluate the predictive accuracy of serum N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) in combinatio...

The urine culture is the "gold standard" for the diagnosis of urinary tract infections (UTI) but constitutes a significant workload in the routine clinical laboratory. Due to the high percentage of negative results, there is a need for an efficient screening method, with a high negative predictive value (NPV) that could reduce the number of unnecessary culture tests. With the purpose of improvi...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to determine the effect of commonly self-prescribed proton pump inhibitors (PPI) on the results of rapid urease test and histology for the diagnosis of H. pylori infection. METHODS One hundred-nine consecutive patients with dyspeptic symptoms attending the endoscopy suite were enrolled in this study. Antrum biopsy specimens were collected at endoscopy for ...

Binary test outcomes typically result from dichotomizing a continuous test variable, observable or latent. The effect of the threshold for test positivity on test sensitivity and specificity has been studied extensively in receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. However, considerably less attention has been given to the study of the effect of the positivity threshold on the predictive...

background: transient elastography (te) is a new modality for the diagnosis of liver fibrosis caused by various etiologies. this study was conducted to determine the accuracy of te in detecting the different stages of liver fibrosis in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (nafld) patients. methods: medline/pubmed, embase, ovid, cochrane library, american college of physicians (acp) journal club, g...

INTRODUCTION A prospective study was designed to assess the performance of the new CT OligoGen kit and the cobas 4800 assay for detection of Chlamydia trachomatis. METHODS A set of samples that included urine samples (n=212), endocervical (n=167), rectal (n=53), pharyngeal (n=7) and urethral swabs (n=3). The samples were sent from a regional sexually transmitted diseases (STD) clinic in Sevil...

Background: Transient elastography (TE) is a new modality for the diagnosis of liver fibrosis caused by various etiologies. This study was conducted to determine the accuracy of TE in detecting the different stages of liver fibrosis in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) patients. Methods: MEDLINE/PubMed, Embase, Ovid, Cochrane Library, American College of Physicians (ACP) Journal Club...

INTRODUCTION Approximately 70% of lung adenocarcinomas express TTF-1. EGFR mutations are present in 13-15% of Western adenocarcinoma patients. This paper investigates TTF1 as a negative predictor of mutant EGFR in lung adenocarcinomas. RESULTS In the pilot cohort (N = 301) two of 224 specimens positive for EGFR mutations had negative TTF-1 expression (sensitivity 99.1%, 95% confidence interva...

Urinalysis and culture are the two most common investigations performed in a microbiology laboratory. Commercial Dipsticks which detect proteins and various enzymes may offer a rapid and inexpensive alternative to urinalysis and culture. An evaluation of the utility of urinary dipsticks (Multistix 10 SG) in predicting urinary tract infections (UTI) was undertaken. A total of 667 urine samples w...

OBJECTIVE To test several weaning predictors as determinants of successful extubation after elective cardiac surgery. METHODS The study was conducted at a tertiary hospital with 100 adult patients undergoing elective cardiac surgery from September to December 2014. We recorded demographic, clinical and surgical data, plus the following predictive indexes: static compliance (Cstat), tidal volu...