Since hepatitis B virus (HBV) infections may cause serious clinical symptoms and become chronic, the appropriate use and interpretation of laboratory tests in diagnosis is crucial. Implementation of serological tests for all HBV markers leads to high cost, labour force and time loss, so diagnostic algorithms are used for this purpose. The aims of this retrospective study were to detect the numb...

Telomeres, the ends of chromosomes, are composed of many kilobases of TTAGGG repeats in vertebrates. These repeats are added by the enzyme telomerase, a ribonucleoprotein DNA polymerase that synthesizes the repeats based on its RNA template. A sensitive assay combining telomerase activity and the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) known as the telomeric repeat amplification protocol (TRAP) has bee...

We acknowledge Dr. Andrea Emilio Salvi for his general comments and opinions on hip resurfacing surgical technique and factors that may affect clinical outcome. Even if no specific question or comment is directly related to our study [2], we will try to provide a scientific input on the points raised. The first ‘‘procedural trap’’ reported by Dr. Salvi is in relation to the femoral component st...

Hormonal, dietary, and metabolic factors play an important role in regulation of renal proximal tubular apical membrane sodium-hydrogen (Na/H) exchange and sodium-phosphate (Na/Pi) cotransport and basolateral membrane sodium-potassium-ATPase (Na-K-ATPase) activity by diverse cellular mechanisms including transcriptional, translational, and posttranslational mechanisms. Recent work in this area ...

T akata et al. 1 recently reported in Nature Genetics that they have identified five novel genetic loci that are associated with prostate cancer in the Japanese population. Using most updated Illumina Quad BeadChip to genotype 3001 prostate cancer patients and 5415 control subjects, they identified 263 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) showing significant association with prostate cancer i...

Sir, Folate pathway inhibitors, such as sulphonamides and trimethoprim, are used for the control of various bacterial pathogens in veterinary medicine. In 2005, they represented the third most frequently used class of antimicrobial agents, accounting for 12.9% of all antimicrobial agents sold in veterinary medicine in Germany (http://www.p-e-g.org/econtext/germap2008). A recent comparison of th...

C-reactive protein (CRP) is an acute-phase reactant and an active regulator of the innate immune system.1,2 Prospective clinical studies have shown that elevations in baseline CRP levels confer, albeit to varying degrees, additional prognostic value for predicting future cardiovascular events and death across all levels of the Framingham risk score.3 CRP has been implicated in multiple aspects ...

INFLAMMATION IS AN ESSENTIAL and protective response to infection and tissue injury. Neutralization of the offending insult activates endogenous pathways, which dampen the acute inflammatory response and trigger repair of the affected tissues to regain homeostasis. However, these do not occur in many patients. Indeed, excessive or dysregulated inflammation together with impaired repair contribu...