background:estrogens play a substantial role in the proliferation, progression and treatment of breast cancer by binding with two estrogen receptors, alpha and beta (erα and erβ). resistance to endocrine therapy is a major problem in the treatment of breast cancers and, in some cases, may be related to loss of er gene expression. we have already showed that erα methylation occurs in high freque...

PURPOSE Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test has become a widely used screening test in prostate cancer (CaP). However, low specificity of serum PSA leads to many false-positive and false-negative results and clinical uncertainty. Development of CaP-specific diagnostic and prognostic markers is needed. Detection of circulating PSA-expressing cells (CPECs) in blood and bone marrow of CaP patient...

Aberrant DNA methylation is associated with cancer development and progression. There are several types of specimens from which DNA methylation pattern can be measured and evaluated as an indicator of disease status (from normal biological process to pathologic condition) and even of pharmacologic response to therapy. Blood-based specimens such as cell-free circulating nucleic acid and DNA extr...

BACKGROUND Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based detection of species specific sequences of the 16S rRNA gene of Tropheryma whippelii is a recently described method for diagnosis of Whipple's disease. AIMS Comparison of histology with PCR in mucosal samples of patients with Whipple's disease before, during, and after treatment. Detection of T whippelii in peripheral blood mononuclear cells as...

BACKGROUND Maspin, a recently identified protein related to the family of serpins, is believed to play a role in human breast cancer. In an effort to improve the present methods of detection, we have developed a reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay for maspin transcript to identify small numbers of mammary carcinoma cells in the peripheral blood and bone marrow of pati...

BACKGROUND Isolated case reports have shown that recipients of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplants (HSCTs) who develop toxoplasmosis may have circulating Toxoplasma gondii DNA in peripheral blood before the onset of clinical symptoms. METHODS We prospectively studied 106 T. gondii-seropositive adult recipients of HSCTs for the incidence of reactivation of toxoplasmosis in the first...

BACKGROUND T cell responses to normal intestinal bacteria or their products may be important in the immunopathogenesis of chronic enterocolitis. AIMS To investigate the T cell specificity and cross reactivity towards intestinal bacteria. PATIENTS/METHODS T cell clones were isolated with phytohaemagglutinin from peripheral blood and biopsy specimens of inflamed and non-inflamed colon from fi...

Background Immune checkpoints like programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) and its ligand PD-L1 are involved in immune escape mechanisms of solid tumors including oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Inhibitors of the pathway are successfully used for treating especially advanced disease. However, the physiological relevance of PD-1/PD-L1-signaling in OSCC is insufficiently understood. The aim of the st...

background: invasive fungal infections (ifis) are chief infectious complications in patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (hsct). however, the diagnosis of fungal infections is difficult, and often empiric treatment initiates. since there is no data available on the prevalence of antifungal drugs administration in allogeneic hsct recipients in iran, we decided to conduct t...