Therapeutic Obstinacy in End-of-Life Care-A Perspective of Healthcare Professionals from Romania.

Background: End-of-life care raises ethical, moral, legal and economic dilemmas, especially when physicians have to decide whether to initiate or to stop treatments that may be considered disproportionate and futile.

Aim: To explore the opinion of health care professionals involved in end-of-life patient care on interventions considered disproportionate and futile at this stage of care, the causes and factors of pressure leading to such situations, and possible solutions to reduce the phenomenon.

Material And Method: The study used an adapted, designed questionnaire intended for health professionals caring for patients at the end of life.

Thrombotic risk in antiphospholipidic syndrome: From hypothesis to current evidence (Review).

Thirty-five years after it was first described, antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) is unanimously recognized as a systemic autoimmune disease, a major acquired thrombophilia, which can affect any arterial or venous vascular territory, explaining the great diversity of clinical manifestations. The current classification criteria updated in the International Consensus Statement for Definite Antiphospholipid Syndrome from Sydney cannot explain alone the unpredictable evolution with thrombotic events of the patients diagnosed with APS. Although the link to genetics and epigenetics has not been clearly defined as in other autoimmune diseases, it is clear that a proper stratification of thrombotic risk in the era of personalized medicine must include classic biological markers (antiphospholipid antibodies, aPL), along with the already recognized phenotypes, non-conventional serological markers, and additional genetic risk factors for thrombosis.

Delayed identification and diagnosis of Huntington's disease due to psychiatric symptoms.

Huntington's disease (HD) is a progressive neurodegenerative illness that affects 2-9/100.000 of the general population. The usual onset is at around age 35-40 years, but there were cases with onset above 55 years.

Cardiovascular risk factors in patients with chronic plaque psoriasis: a case-control study on the Brasov County population.

Many studies have suggested that cardiovascular risk factors seem to be more common in patients with psoriasis than in the general population. In this study we aimed to determine the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors in patients with chronic plaque psoriasis depending on the severity of disease. We conducted a prospective study in Braşov County (Romania) including 142 patients with chronic plaque psoriasis and disease duration of at least six months and 167 controls without psoriasis.

Type-specific prevalence of human papillomavirus by cervical cytology among women in Brasov, Romania.

The oncogenic role of human papillomavirus (HPV) in triggering cervical cancer, the second most common cancer in women worldwide, is well established. Romania ranks in first place in Europe in terms of the incidence of cervical cancer. Geographical widespread data on HPV type-distribution are essential for estimating the impact of HPV vaccines and cervical cancer screening programmes.