The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology offers many benefits to the study of infectious disease, but its use must be restrained by the limits of interpretation of the data generated. Wilborn et al' recently described the results of a PCR-based prospective study of human herpesvirus-6 (HHV-6) infections in bone marrow transplant (BMT) recipients. Their basic conclusions were that HHV6 inf...

BACKGROUND The clinical and pathological features of sarcoidosis and tuberculosis may mimic each other, and when the caseous necrosis is not seen in tuberculosis tissue, differentiation is not easy. OBJECTIVE This study evaluates the ability of real-time PCR quantification and sets the quantitive value to differentiate sarcoidosis from TB. METHODS Formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded sectio...

BACKGROUND Cytomegalovirus is highly prevalent virus and usually occurs in immunocompromised patients. The pathophysiology and treatment of inflammatory bowel disease often induce a state of immunosuppression. Because this, there are still doubts and controversies about the relationship between inflammatory bowel disease and cytomegalovirus. AIM Evaluate the frequency of cytomegalovirus in pa...

BACKGROUND This paper describes the transmission of hepatitis A virus (HAV) to two blood recipients from a healthy donor that later presented to the blood bank with jaundice. METHODS The RNA of HAV was detected by qualitative nested reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (nested RT-PCR) and quantified by real-time RT-PCR. HAV RNA samples were genotyped by direct sequencing of PCR pro...

BACKGROUND Dermatologic manifestations are quite common in patients with adult T cell leukemia and lymphoma and patients with myelopathy and/or tropical spastic paraparesis associated with human T cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1). The aim of this study was to investigate dermatological findings presented by 30 members of a Brazilian family, half of whom are infected with HTLV-1 (as confi...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The detection of PML-RARalpha by real-time polymerase chain reaction (RQ-PCR) is becoming an important tool for monitoring minimal residual disease (MRD) in patients with acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL). However, its clinical value remains to be determined. Our aim was to analyze any associations between the risk of relapse and RQ-PCR results in different phases of ...

Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) and enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus polymerase chain reaction (ERIC-PCR) genomic fingerprinting assays were compared for their ability to differentiate Escherichia coli isolates obtained from various host sources, and with respect to their pathogenicity. One hundred and ten verotoxigenic, enterotoxigenic and non-pathogenic E. coli is...

We analyzed the efficiency of the quantitative real-time PCR assay for cytomegalovirus (CMV) reactivation in adult T-cell leukemia-lymphoma (ATL) patients and compared the results with those obtained with qualitative nested PCR and antigenemia assays. The viral load obtained by the real-time PCR assay closely paralleled the number of antigen-positive cells obtained with the antigenemia assay. R...

OBJECTIVE To assess the usefulness of a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay amplifying the small subunit rRNA coding region of Leishmania species performed on peripheral blood (PB) and bone marrow (BM) aspirates for the diagnosis and follow-up of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) in children living in the Mediterranean basin. DESIGN A prospective study was conducted on children consecutively hosp...

Tumor-related immunoglobulin heavy-chain (IgH) rearrangements are markers for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) detection of minimal residual disease (MRD) in B-cell malignancies. Nested PCR with patient IgH allele-specific oligonucleotide primers can detect 1 tumor cell in 10(4) to 10(6) normal cells. In childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), persistence of PCR-detectable disease is assoc...