The HIT treatment in a cardiac surgery patient.

Heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) occurs in 1 to 3% of patients after cardiac surgery. In patients with suspected or confirmed HIT, the standard of care is withheld of heparin, and an alternative, non-heparin anticoagulant substituted. An established fact is that currently only direct thrombin inhibitors (lepirudin, bivalirudin and argatroban) and heparinoids like danaparoid are approved for alternative anticoagulation in HIT patients.

An improved electronic microarray-based diagnostic assay for identification of MEFV mutations.

Recent technological advances, such as DNA chip devices that allow automated, high-throughput genotyping, promise to considerably improve the detection capability of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in clinically relevant genes. We used the NanoChip(R) Molecular Biology Workstation (Nanogen, www.nanogen.