INTRODUCTION viral DNA levels in serum samples are a useful marker to monitor the disease progression and the treatment response in patients with chronic hepatitis B. Commercial kits for this purpose are available, but they are considerably expensive. OBJECTIVES to evaluate the analytical performance of a real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay for Hepatitis B virus DNA quantificat...

OBJECTIVE To determine the efficacy of 12 weeks therapy with conventional interferon and ribavirin in chronic hepatitis C genotype 2 and 3 naive patients. STUDY DESIGN A randomized clinical trial. PLACE AND DURATION OF STUDY Postgraduate Medical Institute, Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar, from January 2005 to October 2006. METHODOLOGY Two hundred and twenty seven patients with chronic hep...

BACKGROUND Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) is mainly a childhood malignancy but affects both children and adults. OBJECTIVE The study was conducted to evaluate a qualitative PCR based method for detection of clonal immunoglobulin gene rearrangement as a marker of minimal residual disease in patients of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia at the end of induction. METHOD It was a descriptive st...

A long-term assessment of quantitative hepatitis C virus (HCV) testing was performed at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The Quantiplex HCV RNA 2.0 branched-chain DNA (bDNA) assay (Bayer Diagnostics) for hepatitis C viral load determination was used to test 3,471 specimens. bDNA-negative samples were also tested by an in-house qualitative reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR assay with a ...

OBJECTIVE To compare the real-time (RT), and qualitative (Q) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays for detection of Cytomegalovirus (CMV) DNA. METHODS The study took place in the Department of Microbiology, Erciyes University, Kayseri, and in Iontek Laboratory, Istanbul, Turkey, from August to December 2006. One hundred and seven clinical specimens from 67 patients were included in the study...

A comparative study was conducted of a novel real-time quantitative PCR test (LightCycler System) with FastStart DNA Master(PLUS) SYBR Green I dye to detect DNA of human herpes virus 6 (HHV-6). Results were compared with those of a real-time quantitative PCR with hybridization probe (HP) formats using the fluorescence resonance energy transfer method, and with those of a single qualitative PCR ...