Sir, Notwithstanding the implication that a high clinical suspicion of tuberculosis should be a precondition for 'a request for acid fast bacilli and tuberculosis culture' in suspected (but not confirmed) malignant pleural effusion, 1 stigmata documented in malignant pleural effusion, such as the involvement of the entire hemithorax, 1 bilateral effusions, 2 lymphocyte predominance, 1,2 haemoth...

Pleural tuberculosis constitutes a human model of local protective immunity to mycobacterial infection as the disease is usually self-limited and recurrent pleurisy is rare. To identify potentially protective antigens of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, 37 human pleural fluid B cell clones were established using EBV and their supernatants assayed by ELISA and Western blot for antibody reactivity wit...

Tuberculosis is the most prevalent infectious disease in the world. Granuloma formation and caseous necrosis are hallmarks of M. tuberculosis infection and they represent the protective and inflammatory reactions in the infected tissues. The molecular mechanisms that mediate granuloma necrosis are still not well understood. Objectives: To immunolocalize and correlate the amounts of CD68+ macrop...

Twenty-three patients with nonspecific pleuritis were studied to determine clinical outcome. After a mean follow-up period of 6 months (1 to 36 months), a diagnosis was reached in 17 patients, while 6 patients remained unknown. The causes of the nonspecific pleuritis diagnosed on initial pleural biopsy were tuberculosis (11 patients, 48%), neoplasm (2 patients, 8.7%), parapneumonic effusion (1 ...

BACKGROUND Although there are many methods including AFB smear and culture, and the analysis of pleural fluid in the etiological diagnosis of pleural effusion, it is sometimes difficult to confirm a diagnosis especially in cases of incomplete pleural biopsies. Moreover, the high incidence of tuberculous pleuritis in young people caused confusion in the differential diagnosis of pleural effusion...