6027 Background: Polyomaviruses are frequently associated with malignancies in their hosts. Recently, a novel polyoma virus, named Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCV) was identified integrated to the genome of 6 of 10 fresh frozen samples of MCC. These findings suggest an involvement of MCV in the pathogenesis of MCC. Because MCC is a rare tumor, the most readily available tissue is archival formali...

OBJECTIVES To compare the diagnostic efficiency of anti-MCV, anti-CCP2 and RF detection for patients with RA. METHODS Cross-sectional study of patients with established rheumatic disease: rheumatoid arthritis (RA; n=75), psoriatic arthritis (PsA; n=25), 27 patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS; n=27) and connective tissue disease (CTD; n=17). Anti-CCP2, anti-MCV and RF were detected by enz...

Patients with melanoma metastatic to distant sites or at high risk for recurrent melanoma have been treated with a polyvalent melanoma cell vaccine (MCV) in phase II protocols. We assessed in vivo and in vitro cell-mediated responses to MCV in 163 patients who had undergone surgical resection of American Joint Committee on Cancer stage III melanoma. During the first 4 months of vaccine immunoth...

Rheumatoid factor (RF) is currently used in the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The discovery of anticitrullinated protein autoantibodies has led to the development of various new tests, such as anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (anti-CCP) antibodies, and anti-mutated citrullinated vimentin (anti-MCV) antibodies, to diagnose RA. The aims of this study were to determine the sensitivity a...

A measles outbreak occurred among a highly vaccinated population in Alaska during 1998, providing an opportunity to determine the incremental efficacy of >or=2 doses of measles-containing vaccine (MCV) compared with 1 dose. Of 33 confirmed case patients identified, 31 had been vaccinated with 1 dose of MCV, 1 had received 2 doses, and vaccination status was unknown in 1 case. Seventy percent of...

Severe hyperglycemia can result in falsely high results for mean cell (erythrocyte) volume (MCV), which will also cause false results for erythrocyte indices calculated on the basis of MCV. Falsely high MCV results were obtained with the Technicon H1 and H2 analyzers and (to a lesser extent) with the Coulter T660. The H analyzers were more susceptible to this interference than was the Coulter T...

Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) is a rare but aggressive human skin cancer that typically affects elderly and immunosuppressed individuals, a feature suggestive of an infectious origin. We studied MCC samples by digital transcriptome subtraction and detected a fusion transcript between a previously undescribed virus T antigen and a human receptor tyrosine phosphatase. Further investigation led to i...

The mean corpuscular volume (MCV) of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) was determined by Coulter Counter, and data were used to calculate the intracellular drug concentrations. A total of 574 PBMC samples were collected from 190 patients. The MCV was 282.9 fl (minimum, 207.0; maximum, 354.6), with a standard deviation of 8.8%. Previous reports have often used a fixed value of 400 fl fo...

Background: Molluscum contagiosum virus (MCV): is a viral skin infection which may infect themucous membrane and skinoccasionally, It is caused by Molluscipox virus from family Poxviridae. Molluscum contagiosumvirus (MCV) was first described and later assigned its name by Bateman in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Aim: This study was done to confirm the clinical diagnosis of MCV by lab...