BACKGROUND The clinical diagnosis of meningococcal disease (MCD) can be difficult. Non-culture methods like the previous ELISA meningococcal PCR improved case confirmation rates, but were not ideal. A Taqman meningococcal PCR, using DNA extracted from serum (S-Taqman), which has an improved sensitivity compared to the ELISA method in vitro, was introduced into clinical practice in July 1997. A ...

High-intensity (resistance) exercise (HIT) and whole-body electromyostimulation (WB-EMS) are both approaches to realize time-efficient favorable changes of body composition and strength. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of WB-EMS compared with the gold standard reference HIT, for improving body composition and muscle strength in middle-aged men. Forty-eight healthy u...

OBJECTIVE To determine the feasibility of using whole-body cardiovascular MRI (WB-CVMR) to compare South Asians (SAs)-a population known to have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) but paradoxically lower prevalence of peripheral arterial disease-and Western Europeans (WEs). METHODS 19 SAs and 38 age-, gender- and body mass index-matched WEs were recruited. All were aged 40 years an...

We report on two listening tests to determine the speech quality of different wideband (WB) speech codecs. In the first test, we have studied various network conditions, including WB–WB and WB–narrowband (WB– NB) tandeming, packet loss, and background noise. In addition to other findings, this test showed some codec quality rank-order changes when compared to the literature. To evaluate the hyp...

The purpose of this study was to enhance the sensitivity of the Western blot (WB) test for use as an alternative and confirmatory method for the diagnosis of scrapie and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in Canada by comparing 2 sample preparation procedures: an abnormal prion protein (PrPSc) concentration procedure using sodium phosphotungstic acid (PTA) precipitation and a procedure using crude s...

BACKGROUND Whole-body (WB) positron emission tomography (PET) with 2-[(18)F]-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (FDG) is more accurate than other imaging studies for detecting lung cancer and extrathoracic metastatic disease. Thoracic PET (from the skull base through the kidneys) may be equally as useful as WB PET (skull base to mid-thigh). With the recent introduction of hybrid CT-PET systems, use of th...

UNLABELLED Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) Western Blot (WB) tests are used as an aid in the diagnosis of acquired immunodeficiency disease syndrome (AIDS) and related disorders. The object of this study is to examine and compare the results of four commercially available HIV WB methods. Sera from 974 persons were tested by four (Kits I, II, III, and IV) HIV WB methods from different vendors...

BACKGROUND indeterminate Western blot (WB) patterns are a major concern for diagnosis of human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) infection, even in non-endemic areas. OBJECTIVES (a) to define the prevalence of indeterminate WB among different populations from Argentina; (b) to evaluate if low proviral load (PVL) is associated with indeterminate WB profiles; and (c) to describe mutatio...

The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is a therapeutic target (oncotarget) in NSCLC. Using in vitro EGFR kinase activity system, we identified a novel small molecule, WB-308, as an inhibitor of EGFR. WB-308 decreased NSCLC cell proliferation and colony formation, by causing G2/M arrest and apoptosis. Furthermore, WB-308 inhibited the engraft tumor growths in two animal models in vivo (lun...

Whole-body electromyostimulation (WB-EMS) has been shown to be effective in increasing muscle strength and mass in elderly women. Because of the interaction of muscles and bones, these adaptions might be related to changes in bone parameters. 76 community-living osteopenic women 70 years and older were randomly assigned to either a WB-EMS group (n = 38) or a control group (CG: n = 38). The WB-E...