BACKGROUND The Netherlands does not have a national haemoglobinopathy (HbP)-carrier screening programme aimed at facilitating informed reproductive choice. HbP-carrier testing for those at risk is at best offered on the basis of anaemia. Registration of ethnicity has proved controversial and may complicate the introduction of a screening programme if based on ethnicity. However, other factors m...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE On the basis of combined measurements of clinic blood pressure (CBP) and home blood pressure (HBP), blood pressure status can be divided into normotension, white-coat hypertension (WCHT), masked hypertension (MHT), and sustained hypertension (SHT). Despite the clear impact of MHT and SHT on clinical and subclinical arterial disease, uncertainty about the influence of WCHT...

PURPOSE To assess intra-observer, inter-observer and inter-modality (CT vs. MRI) reproducibility of liver surface nodularity (LSN) scores measured with software used for detection of liver fibrosis. METHODS This IRB-approved retrospective study included patients with both abdominal CT and MRI within 6 months of histopathologic sampling. Two independent observers used post-processing software ...

AIM With increasing urbanization of lifestyle, cardiovascular morbidity and mortality have been on the increase in Africans. Studies on cardiovascular risk factors in rural communities in South East Nigeria are scarce. This study focused on hypertension and obesity in adult Nigerians dwelling in a rural setting in Eastern Nigeria. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 218 participants from the rur...

Infectious diseases remain a major health problem, where sepsis and other severe infectious diseases are common causes of morbidity and mortality. The importance of early and appropriate treatment of sepsis and severe bacterial infections has been underlined by the successes of measures like the Surviving Sepsis Campaign, among others. Thus, there is a need for clinical and laboratory tools to ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the impact of Primary Health Care (PHC) nursing workforce characteristics and of the clinical practice environment (CPE) perceived by nurses on the control of high-blood pressure (HBP). DESIGN Cross-sectional analytical study. SETTING Administrative and clinical registries of hypertensive patients from PHC information systems and questionnaire from PHC nurses. PARTI...

OBJECTIVE To compare the diagnostic performance of gadoxetic acid-enhanced magnetic resonance (MR) imaging with that of triple-phase multidetector-row computed tomography (MDCT) in the detection of liver metastasis. MATERIALS AND METHODS Our institutional review board approved this retrospective study and waived informed consent. The study population consisted of 51 patients with hepatic meta...

PURPOSE Recently, the number of elderly patients has increased due to a longer life expectancy. Among these elderly patients, more octogenarians will be diagnosed with major hepatobiliary pancreatic (HBP) diseases. Therefore, we need to evaluate the safety and risk factors of major HBP surgery in patients older than 80 years. METHODS From January 2000 to April 2015, patients who underwent maj...

Objectives: (1) To compare blood pressure (BP) readings with an automated arm cuff oscillometric device (AutoBP) to readings with a mercury sphygmomanometer (HgBP) and (2) to evaluate the impact on the prevalence of hypertension (HBP) in a population-based survey. Methods: (1) In a convenience sample (‘‘Comparison Study’’), we measured BP with both AutoBP (Visomat OZ2) and HgBP and we modeled B...

Pseudomonas azelaica HBP1 can use 2-hydroxybiphenyl (2-HBP) and 2,2'-dihydroxybiphenyl as sole carbon and energy sources by means of the hbp regulon. This regulon is composed of three genes, hbpCA and hbpD, coding for enzymes of a meta-cleavage pathway and the hbpR gene, which codes for a XylR/DmpR-type transcription regulator. It was previously shown that HbpR activates transcription from two ...