BACKGROUND Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL), a severe parasitic disease, could be fatal if diagnosis and treatment is delayed. Post kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis (PKDL), a skin related outcome, is a potential reservoir for the spread of VL. Diagnostic tests available for VL such as tissue aspiration are invasive and painful although they are capable of evaluating the treatment response. Serological...

BACKGROUND Rapid diagnostic tests are urgently needed to mitigate HIV-associated tuberculosis (TB) mortality. We evaluated diagnostic accuracy of the rapid urine lipoarabinomannan (LAM) test for pulmonary TB and assessed the effect of a two-sample strategy. METHODS HIV-infected adults eligible for antiretroviral therapy were prospectively enrolled from Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Ghana and ...

BACKGROUND The existing World Health Organization diagnostic algorithms for smear-negative TB perform poorly in HIV-infected individuals. New TB diagnostics such as urine TB lipoarabinomannan (LAM) could improve the accuracy and reduce delays in TB diagnosis in HIV-infected smear-negative presumptive TB. We sought to determine predictors for MTB culture-positivity among these patients. METHOD...

INTRODUCTION International guidelines have endorsed spot urine protein-to-creatinine ratio of >30 mg protein/mmol creatinine as an alternative to a 24-hour urine sample to represent significant proteinuria. This study aimed to determine the accuracy of spot urine protein-to-creatinine ratio in predicting significant proteinuria and adverse pregnancy outcome. METHODS This case series was condu...

Augmented renal clearance (ARC) is a manifestation of enhanced renal function seen in critically ill patients. The use of regular unadjusted doses of renally eliminated drugs in patients with ARC might lead to therapy failure. The purpose of this scoping review was to provide and up-to-date summary of the available evidence pertaining to the phenomenon of ARC. A literature search of databases o...

Our aim was to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy and clinical utility of a serotype-specific urinary antigen detection multiplex assay for identification of 13 pneumococcal serotypes (1, 3, 4, 5, 6A, 6B, 7F, 9V, 14, 18C, 19A, 19F and 23F) in urine of patients with community-acquired pneumonia. Adult patients with clinical suspicion of community-acquired pneumonia were included. In addition to st...

The objective of our study was to evaluate and standardise the method of spot (random) urine protein creatinine ratio (UP/C) for estimation of proteinuria. The study contained 241 study participants in a tertiary care hospital inclusive of 208 cases and 33 normal volunteers. The 24 hour urine protein estimation was done on 24 hour urine samples and UP/C ratio was calculated on random urine samp...

Impaired intestinal calcium absorption contributes to osteoporosis, but its measurement is limited to research settings. We hypothesized that 24-hour urine calcium (24HUC) values could diagnose low fractional calcium absorption (FCA). We performed a post hoc analysis of clinical trial data to determine whether 24HUC predicted low FCA compared with the gold standard dual calcium isotope method. ...