In the December 2008 Issue of Clinics

As CLINICS completes its 6 year of existence we believe we have reasons for a little bit of celebration. In June 2010 The Journal of Citation Reports of the Institute for Scientific Information posted its first Impact Factor for CLINICS, which confirmed the positive trend we had been monitoring through the Scimago Index of Scopus. Over the years 2006 – 2008 we had consistently maintained a cites per document level ranging between 1.0 and 1.3. In June, the 2009 Impact Factor came out at 1.591, the second highest Brazilian IF. We also decided to give the journal a face lift and as from August 2010 we are posting an e-book of each issue in our internet site. In the near future we hope to make the entire collection available in this format. Figure 1 shows monthly article submission for the 2 year period 2009-2010, showing the dramatic effect of the posting of the impact factor on submissions, which quadrupled from May to September. This has meant that the number of published articles also increased from 12 original research articles in 2009 to 18 in the last months of 2010. In this final issue of 2010 we publish fifteen original articles of clinical investigation plus seven of basic research. Souza et al. evaluated the performance of support vector machine, multi-layer perceptron and radial basis function neural networks, as auxiliary tools to identify keratoconus from Orbscan II maps. They conclude that support vector machine, multi-layer percetron classifiers and radial basis function neural network classifiers, trained on Orbscan II data, could represent useful techniques for keratoconus detection. Parra et al. performed a a detailed histopathological analysis of the open lung biopsy of a series of five cases of ARDS confirmed H1N1. They conclude that viral-like particles can be successfully demonstrated in lung tissue by ultrastructural examination, particularly in those patients without RT-PCR from nasopharingeal aspirate confirmation of the virus. They also found that bronchioles and epithelium, rather than endothelium, are probably the primary target of infection and diffuse alveolar damage the consequence of airways obliteration and dysfunction on innate immunity Wiedemann et al. correlated preoperative serum Nterminal pro brain type natriuretic peptide with the postoperative outcome and mid term survival rates of coronary artery bypass patients and conclude that these preoperative of levels the peptide .502 ng/ml predict mid-term mortality after isolated coronary artry bypass graft and are associated with significantly higher hospital mortality and perioperative complications. Franceschini et al. assessed the reliability of the Brazilian version of the Functional Assessment of Cancer TherapyLung combined with the FACT-Lung Symptom Index questionnaires for the measurement of quality of life in patients with lung cancer and conclude that the Brazilian version is reliable, quick and simple to apply, so that this instrument can now be used to properly evaluate the quality of life of Brazilian lung cancer patients. Jones et al. evaluated the difference in isokinetic strength of hip muscles between patients with knee osteoarthritis vs. matched healthy controls and conclude that patients with osteoarthritis of the knee exhibit lower isokinetic strength in the hip muscles compared with control subjects without osteoarthritis. Strengthening the muscles surrounding the hip joint would appear to have potential to help decrease pain in people with knee osteoarthritis. Kayıran et al. describe 35 patients with Kawasaki disease in Istambul in the most comprehensive series of children with the disease reported from Turkey. They conclude that adult onset ischemic heart disease may be due to Kawasaki disease in childhood, indicating that further prospective clinical investigations are needed to understand the epidemiology and longterm follow-up of the disease. Gualco et al. described the clinical pathological characteristics of 1301 cases of pediatric/adolescent lymphomas in patients from different geographic regions of Brazil in what appears to be largest series of pediatric lymphomas presented from Brazil and suggest that some of the results found in this study may reflect heterogeneous socioeconomical status and environmental factors of the Brazilian population in the different regions. Kikuchi et al. performed a national survey to update hepatocellular carcinoma epidemiology in Brazil and determined clinical and epidemiological profiles of patients with disease in different Brazilian regions. including data from 29 centers on 1,405 patients diagnosed with hepatocellular carcinoma from 2004 to 2009. They found that the epidemiology, classification, and therapy selection for hepatocellular carcinoma varied among Brazilian regions. Hepatitis C infection was the most common etiology of liver cirrhosis; chemoembolization was the most common therapy employed. Liver cirrhosis was the main risk factor for hepatocellular carcinoma development in Brazil. Carvalho et al. investigated the clinical and pathological significance of podoplanin expression in the intratumoral stroma and neoplastic cells of early stage uterine cervical cancer. A total of 143 patients with clinical stage I and IIA uterine cervical carcinomas underwent surgery between 2000 and 2007 were surveyed. and conclude that these preliminary results suggest that podoplanin may have a role Rocha-e-Silva M. Hospital das Clı́nicas, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo Email: [email protected] Tel.: 55 11 3069-6235