Publications by authors named "Benjamin Kukull"

Nasopharyngeal swabs have historically been considered the preferred specimen type for the detection of respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. However, in response to a global pandemic with shortages of swabs and specimen transport media, limited access to qualified health care personnel, and needs for large-scale testing in nonmedical settings, alternative sample types have been validated for COVID-19 diagnosis. The purpose of this review is to highlight the diagnostic accuracy and clinical utility of non-nasopharyngeal respiratory samples for SARS-CoV-2 molecular diagnostic testing.

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Whipple's Disease, a rare diagnosis caused by the slow-growing bacterium , most often presents with the classically described signs of malabsorption due to gastrointestinal colonization. However, it can also have signs and symptoms that clinically overlap with rheumatic diseases, potentially resulting in misdiagnosis. Furthermore, treatment with modern potent biologic immunosuppressive agents and classic disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) can lead to serious exacerbation of undiagnosed infections.

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Atypical and malignant lipomatous tumors are infrequent in the pediatric population. Within this uncommon cohort, the morphologically and genetically related spectrum of atypical lipomatous tumor/well-differentiated liposarcoma/dedifferentiated liposarcoma (ALT/WDL/DDLS) is markedly rare. Their shared characteristic molecular aberration is a genomic amplicon of a region of chromosome 12q, including the oncogenes and .

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Collapsing glomerulopathy has been described in settings of viral infections, drug, genetic, ischemic, renal transplant, and idiopathic conditions. It has a worse prognosis than other morphologic variants of focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, and may be treated with aggressive immunosuppression. In this study, we sought to characterize the clinical and morphologic findings in older adults with collapsing glomerulopathy.

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The translation of genomic sequencing technology to the clinic has greatly advanced personalized medicine. However, the presence of normal cells in tumors is a confounding factor in genome sequence analysis. Tumor purity, or the percentage of cancerous cells in whole tissue section, is a correction factor that can be used to improve the clinical utility of genomic sequencing.

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