First Evidence of Angiostrongyliasis Caused by in Guadeloupe, Lesser Antilles.

Infection by the rat lungworm represents the most common cause of infectious eosinophilic meningitis in humans, causing central nervous system (CNS) angiostrongyliasis. Most of CNS angiostrongyliasis cases were described in Asia, Pacific Basin, Australia, and some limited parts of Africa and America. CNS angiostrongyliasis has been reported in the Caribbean but never in the Lesser Antilles.

Real time identification of drug-induced liver injury (DILI) through daily screening of ALT results: a prospective pilot cohort study.

Objective: Identification of drug-induced liver disease (DILI) is difficult, even among hospitalized patients. The aim of this pilot study was to assess the impact of a specific strategy for DILI screening.

Design: We prospectively compared the number of acute DILI cases identified in one week of a proactive strategy based on centralized elevated ALT values to those identified with a standard of care strategy for 24-week period based on referral cases to the hepatology unit.

Liver biopsy analysis has a low level of performance for diagnosis of intermediate stages of fibrosis.

Background & Aims: There is controversy about the performance of noninvasive tests such as FibroTest in diagnosing intermediate stages of fibrosis. We investigated whether this controversy results from limitations of biopsy analysis for intermediate-stage fibrosis and inappropriate determination of the standard area under the receiver-operator characteristic curve (AUROC).

Methods: To determine whether biopsy has a lower diagnostic performance for fibrosis stage F2 (few septa) vs F1 (fibrosis without septa), compared with its performance for F1 vs F0 or F4 vs F3, we determined the fibrotic areas of large surgical samples collected from 20 consecutive patients with chronic liver disease or normal liver tissue that surrounded tumors.

What are the best reference values for a normal serum alanine transaminase activity (ALT)? Impact on the presumed prevalence of drug induced liver injury (DILI).

Background: In clinical research, the definition of the upper limit of normal (ULN) is rarely detailed. For alanine transaminase (ALT), there are several definitions of ULN-ALT but no recognized global reference. Furthermore the inter-laboratory variability of results expressed using ULN-ALT is higher than using the actual value of ULN expressed in IU/L.