BACKGROUND Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a common respiratory disorder in children, which necessitates hospitalization. Bacterial pneumonia, especially lobar pneumonia and parapneumonic effusions, is associated with considerably severe clinical course and extensive alveolar infiltrates. Serum procalcitonin (PCT) level has been used to distinguish bacterial from viral infections, but its...

Asbestos related lesions of the lung parenchyma and the pleura can be divided into three main types: parietal pleural plaques, diffuse interstitial fibrosis ("classical asbestosis"), and a third type of reaction affecting both the pleura and the lung parenchyma. The last type includes such lesions as acute pleurisy, diffuse pleural thickening, and rounded atelectasis. Among 1344 patients with a...

Plasma viscosity (PV) and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) are tests which can be used as inflammation and tissue injury markers [2, 11]. ESR usage is more extended than PV in clinical laboratories. However ESR may be haematocrit (Ht) dependent and is related with red blood cell (RBC) rheological properties [1], whereas RBC are not involved in PV. We aimed to evaluate retrospectively the im...

OBJECTIVE Patients with RA have an increased risk of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular (CV) diseases compared with the general population. The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of inflammatory burden in the formation of carotid plaques in patients with RA. METHODS We performed carotid artery US to measure the carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) and plaques in 406 patients with RA a...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the present study was to investigate the associations of cumulative inflammatory burden (assessed by serial measurements of inflammatory markers) and classical cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors with asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) in a large prospective cohort of patients with established RA. METHODS Two hundred and one RA patients [155 females, median age 67 y...

AIM To investigate links between platelet parameters mean platelet volume (MPV), platelet count (PC), platelet distribution width (PDW), platelet mass (PM) and brucella tube agglutination titers (BSTAT) in patients with brucellosis. Initially, PC, MPV, PM and PDW calculations were compared between periods before and after treatment. The correlation between inflammation markers (erythrocyte sedi...

Introduction: Serious reproductive health consequences linked to pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) include infertility and ectopic pregnancy. Thus, it is important to identify patients likely to have a poor prognosis in choosing the best initial treatment. The aim of our study was to identify the valuable prognosis predictors of PID among the hospitalized patients and determined cut off values ...

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a low grade systemic inflammatory disease in which many inflammatory mediators are known to be elevated in the peripheric blood. Blood platelet lymphocyte ratio (PLR) and mean platelet volume (MPV) are accepted as novel markers in many of the systemic inflammatory disorders, but have not been investigated in synovitis-free radiographic OA yet.The aim of this study was to ...

We sought to validate measurement of intraventricular pressure gradients (IVPG) and analyze their change in patients with hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy (HOCM) after ethanol septal reduction (ESR). Quantitative analysis of color M-mode Doppler (CMM) images may be used to estimate diastolic IVPG noninvasively. Noninvasive IVPG measurement was validated in 10 patients undergoing surgical...

OBJECTIVES To examine associations between red blood cell distribution width (RDW) and organ involvement and disease activity in patients with Behçet's disease. METHODS Haematological and inflammatory parameters including RDW, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) were examined in patients with Behçet's disease and in healthy controls. Patients w...