Ankylosing spondylitis is the prototype of inflammatory rheumatic diseases grouped under the term spondyloarthritis or spondyloarthropathy (SpA). New classification criteria for SpA have now been proposed; the patients are subgrouped into (1) a predominantly axial disease, termed axial SpA, which includes AS, and (2) peripheral SpA. There is an unacceptable delay in the diagnosis of axial SpA, ...

OBJECTIVE This study was performed to assess our clinical experience with single-port access (SPA) laparoscopic cystectomy and myomectomy and the surgical outcomes of those procedures at our institution. METHODS The authors evaluated the surgical outcomes of SPA laparoscopic cystectomy in 293 patients and SPA laparoscopic myomectomy in 246 patients. The surgical outcomes comprised operation t...

Staphylococcal protein A (SpA) and streptococcal protein G (SpG) affinity chromatography are the gold standards for purifying monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) in therapeutic applications. However, camelid VHH single-domain Abs (sdAbs or VHHs) are not bound by SpG and only sporadically bound by SpA. Currently, VHHs require affinity tag-based purification, which limits their therapeutic potential and...

The spa gene of Staphylococcus aureus encodes protein A and is used for typing of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). We used sequence typing of the spa gene repeat region to study the epidemiology of MRSA at a German university hospital. One hundred seven and 84 strains were studied during two periods of 10 and 4 months, respectively. Repeats and spa types were determined by Ri...

Interaction of staphylococcal protein A (SPA) with human serum depressed the ability of such serum to neutralize herpes simpled virus (HSV)-antibody labialis. SPA-induced depression of serum-dependent virus neutralization appeared to be due to consumption of complement by SPA. In addition, SPA attached to antibody-treated, HSV-infected cells and inhibited complement mediated immune cytolysis. T...

Physical appearance has a great importance on how people are viewed in their social environment. Many researchers in sport and exercise psychology have, therefore, applied a self-presentational approach to the study of sport and exercise behaviour (Hausenblas, Bewer & van Raalte, 2004). Since the seminal work of Hart, Leary and Rejeski (1992), researchers have examined the relationship between ...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to identify leukocyte cell types found within the synovia of patients with seronegative spondylarthropathies (SpA), such as ankylosing spondylitis (AS), using transcription based analyses. METHODS Leukocyte transcriptional profiles obtained from the NCBI's gene expression omnibus and prediction analysis of microarrays (PAM) was used to identify 25-ge...

In this paper, we extend our work on iterative softinput soft-output (SISO) decoding of high density parity check (HDPC) codes. Edge-local complementation (ELC) is a graph operation which can be used to give structural diversity during decoding with the sum-product algorithm (SPA). We describe the specific subgraphs required for ELC to not increase the weight of the Tanner graph beyond a specif...

Balneotherapy or Spa therapy is used in neurological, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, dermatological and gynecological diseases, in infertility as well as in metabolic disturbances. Beneficial effects of balneotherapy at the metabolic level is not fully understood. Authors have documented enhancement of antioxidants concentrations (coenzyme Q10- CoQ(10-OX) and alpha-tocopherol) of women with g...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW Inflammatory innate and adaptive immune cell responses to commensal bacteria underlie the pathogenesis of human chronic inflammatory diseases. Intestinal dysbiosis has been described in patients with spondyloarthritis (SpA) and seems to be correlated with histologic and immunologic alterations. Purpose of this review is to discuss the relationship occurring between intestinal ...