BACKGROUND Low temperatures and slow blood flow may result from peripheral neuropathy caused by leprosy, and the simple detection of cold fingers could already be a preliminary classification for these patients. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether infrared thermography would be able to measure this change in temperature in the hands of people with leprosy. METHOD The study assessed 17 leprosy ...

OBJECTIVE Our purpose was to elucidate the patterns and trends of autochthonous leprosy in Japan from 1964 to 2008, to compare them with the findings from other studies of leprosy in decline, and to determine whether M. leprae transmission persists in Japan. DESIGN Data on registered leprosy cases in Japan in the period 1964-2008 were analysed with reference to trends in case detection, geogr...

Background and objectives High-resolution ultrasonography (HRUS) has become a vital imaging tool in the management of leprosy. This case-control study analyzed sonographic data on median nerves leprosy healthy controls to identify features characteristic Methods Newly diagnosed treatment naïve Hansen’s patients both sexes aged >16 years were included study. The control group prospectively en...

Su mmary. The fine structural changes and, to a lesser extent, histochemical and histopathological features of biopsy specimens of nerves from patients with non-lepromatous leprosy ( mainly very early cases) , or lepromatous leprosy (mostly treated cases) , have been studied from the point of view of possible immunological response of the host tissues. Using electronmicro­ scopy and acid phosph...

The immune response in leprosy forms a spectrum with lepromatous leprosy patients exhibiting specific unresponsiveness to antigens of Mycobacterium leprae. This unresponsiveness is thought to be related to the prevalence of T8-positive lymphocyte in these lepromatous lesions. To analyze the immunoregulatory function of these T8 cells, we developed simple procedures to extract lymphocytes from s...

The involvement of lymph nodes in leprosy is said to have been recorded by Gadesden in the 15th century (8) , and has been included as a feature in all modern textbooks dealing with leprosy. Klingmtiller (14), Basombrio (2), Schujman and Vaccaro (24) and Furniss (1) have described the gross and microscopic appearances of the lymph nodes in leprosy. Leprologists are unanimous that the lymph node...

A Workshop on Leprosy Chemotherapy was convened under the auspices of the U.S. Leprosy Panel of the U.S.-Japan Cooperative Medical Science Program of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease on 26 October 1975 in Bethesda, Maryland. The workshop provided a unique opportunity to bring together participants from other countries as well to discuss three of the most pressing issues ...

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES Leprosy prominently involves both the skin and peripheral neural tissues and some symptoms persist after microbial cure. Because alterations in the dermis also occur in leprosy, we assessed here whether there were changes in cutaneous resonance running time (CRRT), a parameter that is influenced by collagen properties, in cured leprosy subjects. METHODS A reviscometer wa...

Sera from leprosy patients across the clinical spectrum, healthy contacts, tuberculosis patients, and healthy donors were tested for their reactivity with antigens of mycobacterial strain ICRC (a cultivable mycobacterium) and Mycobacterium leprae by immunoprecipitation technique. Using M. leprae antigens, it was not possible to distinguish between reactivities of sera from lepromatous, borderli...

BACKGROUND Renal lesions in leprosy have been extensively described, including amyloidosis, glomerulonephritis, nephrosclerosis, tubulointerstitial nephritis and granulomas. MATERIAL AND METHODS A retrospective study was designed to detect renal function abnormalities in 461 leprosy patients, without any co-morbidity, seen in a university hospital in northeast Brazil. The laboratory test resu...