Development of a sensitive PCR-dot blot assay to supplement serological tests for diagnosing Lyme disease.

Laboratory diagnosis of Lyme disease is difficult and presently dependent on detecting Borrelia burgdorferi-specific antibodies in patient serum with the disadvantage that the immune response to B. burgdorferi can be weak or variable, or alternatively, the slow and inefficient culture confirmation of B. burgdorferi.

Live births after embryo selection using morphokinetics versus conventional morphology: a retrospective analysis.

The increasing corpus of clinical studies using time-lapse imaging for embryo selection demonstrates considerable variation in study protocols and only limited-sized study cohorts. Outcome measures are based on implantation or clinical pregnancy; some predict blastulation from early cleavage-stage data, and few have evaluated live birth. Erroneously, most studies treat the embryos as independent variables and do not include patient or treatment variables in the statistical analyses.

Hypovitaminosis D and valvular calcification in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy.

Background: In patients with dilated (idiopathic) cardiomyopathy (DCM), little is known about the presence of valvular calcification and its association with hypovitaminosis D, which may predispose affected tissues to calcification. Our objectives were 2-fold: to conduct a retrospective assessment of echocardiographic evidence of valvular calcification in patients with DCM who were known to have hypovitaminosis D (25(OH)D <30 ng/mL) and to conduct a prospective assessment of serum 25(OH)D in patients with DCM, who had demonstrated echocardiographic evidence of valvular calcification.

Methods: The retrospective study consisted of 48 African American patients (34 men, 14 women; 52.

Reduced relative lymphocyte count in african-americans with decompensated heart failure.

Background: A reduction in relative lymphocyte count (%L) has been reported in whites with heart failure that inversely correlated with jugular venous pressure thereby implicating systemic venous hypertension with splanchnic congestion.

Objectives: : To study whether a reduced %L (<20%) occurs in African-Americans (AA) with heart failure and to address pathophysiologic mechanisms having the potential to influence lymphocyte biology and survival, we monitored patients with or without systemic venous hypertension, hypoalbuminemia, hypovitaminosis D, and secondary hyperparathyroidism.

Methods: In 131 AA (90 men; 53 +/- 12 years): 113 were hospitalized, 50 with decompensated biventricular failure (DecompHF), 24 with acute left heart failure, and 39 with heart disease, but no heart failure (HDNHF); and 18 were outpatients with compensated heart failure.