To investigate the appropriate cutoff point of CA19-9 for prognosis and other potential prognostic factors that may affect survival of patients with hilar cholangiocarcinoma (HC) after radical surgery. 168 patients who had undergone radical surgery for hilar cholangiocarcinoma and resultant macroscopic curative resection (R0 and R1) were discreetly selected for analyses. Categorized versions we...

Background. To assess the ability of mid-trimester sFlt-1/PlGF ratio for prediction of preeclampsia in two different Arabic populations. Methods. This study measured levels of sFlt-1, PlGF, and sFlt-1/PlGF ratio at midtrimester in 83 patients who developed preeclampsia with contemporary 250 matched controls. Results. Women subsequently developed preeclampsia had significantly lower PlGF levels ...

Frailty has emerged as a major health issue among older patients. A consensus on definition and diagnosis is yet to be achieved. Various biochemical abnormalities have been reported in frailty. Activation of sirtuins, a conserved family of NAD-dependent proteins, is one of the many mimics of calorie restriction which improves lifespan and health in experimental animals. In this cross-sectional ...

upstream blankets, drains and cutoff walls are considered as effective measures to reduce seepage, uplift pressure and exit gradient under the foundation of hydraulic structures. to investigate the effectiveness of these measures, individually or in accordance with others, a large number of experiments were carried out on a laboratory model. to extend the investigation for unlimited arrangement...

objective: the two most frequent hypochromic microcytic anemias are β- thalassemia minor (btm) and iron deficiency anemia (ida). several discrimination indices have been proposed to quickly discriminate these similar entities via parameters obtained from automated blood count analyzers. the aim of this study to evaluate the diagnostic reliability of ten discrimination indices in the differentia...

In this study, we carried out a comparative analysis between two classical methodologies to prospect residue contacts in proteins: the traditional cutoff dependent (CD) approach and cutoff free Delaunay tessellation (DT). In addition, two alternative coarse-grained forms to represent residues were tested: using alpha carbon (CA) and side chain geometric center (GC). A database was built, compri...

Recent reviews recommended the use of the aldosterone/renin ratio (ARR) to screen for primary hyperaldosteronism. However, widely different cutoff levels have been proposed, and test characteristics of ARR under different conditions of sampling are not known. We conducted a retrospective review among 45 subjects with carefully validated diagnoses of primary hyperaldosteronism and 17 subjects wi...

OBJECTIVE This study assessed the vitamin A nutritional status of preterm infants determined by the vitamin A relative dose-response test (RDR) compared with serum levels of vitamin A, retinol-binding protein (RBP), transthyretin (TTR), and retinol relations with carrier proteins. METHODS Serum levels of retinol, RBP, and TTR and retinol/RBP, retinol/TTR, and RBP/TTR molar ratios were determi...

Lower cutoff levels in screening programs have led to an increase in the proportion of detected cases of transient hypothyroidism, leading to an increase in the overall prevalence of primary congenital hypothyroidism (CH) in several countries. We have performed a retrospective evaluation on the data from 251,008 (96.72%) neonates screened for thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) level in dried blo...

Acute kidney injury (AKI) most commonly occurs in critically ill and postoperative patients. Tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinases-2 (TIMP-2) and insulin-like growth factor-binding protein 7 (IGFBP7) are two newly-identified urinary biomarkers that can help to detect early AKI, yet their predictive accuracies range widely. Here, we conduct a systematic meta-analysis to evaluate the diagnostic ...