Modelling of patient journey in chronic spontaneous urticaria: Increasing awareness and education by shorten patients' disease journey in Germany.

Background: Chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) is both physically and emotionally stressful, and guideline recommendations are often not optimally implemented in clinical practice. The objective of this study was to provide an overview on the patient journey in CSU and to develop a mathematical model based on solid data.

Methods: The journey of CSU patients in Germany was traced through literature review and expert meetings that included medical experts, pharmacists and representatives of patient organizations.

Antihistamine-resistant chronic spontaneous urticaria: 1-year data from the AWARE study.

Background: Previous reports indicate that patients with chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) are undertreated and that physicians show poor adherence to guideline recommendations. Awareness of CSU has improved in recent years, but it remains unclear if this has improved the management of these patients in clinical practice.

Objective: To describe disease burden, quality of life (QoL), and treatment patterns of patients with H -antihistamine-refractory CSU in Germany.

H1-antihistamine-refractory chronic spontaneous urticaria: it's worse than we thought - first results of the multicenter real-life AWARE study.

Background: Most data on chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) originate from highly selected patient populations treated at specialized centres. Little is known about CSU patient characteristics and the burden of CSU in routine clinical practice. AWARE (A World-wide Antihistamine-Refractory chronic urticaria patient Evaluation) is an ongoing global study designed to assess chronic urticaria in the real-life setting.

Microarray-based characterisation of a Panton-Valentine leukocidin-positive community-acquired strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of novel methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains that produce the potent toxin Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL). PVL-positive strains can cause complicated skin infections or necrotising pneumonia with high mortality, and these strains have the potential for epidemic spread in the community. In 2004-2005, two case clusters and two isolated cases were observed in eastern Saxony and southern Brandenburg.