Twenty-three year-old with pleuritic chest pain.

Clinical Introduction: A 23-year-old woman followed at another medical centre for congenital heart disease (CHD) presented to our emergency clinic with 3 weeks of bilateral pleuritic chest pain. She returned from holiday in Greece 6 weeks earlier where a tattoo and nasal piercing had been performed. There was no history of night sweats or fever.

Sialic acid: a novel marker of cardiovascular disease?

The global burden posed by cardiovascular disease (CVD), due to a rising incidence of known risk factors, underlines an urgent need to identify other potential risk factors. Sialic acid (SA), an abundant terminal monosaccharide of glycoconjugates, is a possible risk factor for CVD. Although large-scale epidemiological surveys have shown that serum total sialic acid (TSA) is positively associated with mortality from coronary artery disease (CAD) and stroke, studies investigating the correlation between serum TSA and the severity of atherosclerosis are conflicting.

The inborn errors of sialic acid metabolism and their laboratory investigation.

Sialic acid (SA), a terminal monosaccharide of glycoconjugates, has a central role in human biological function. Various point mutations result in the malmetabolism of SA and inherited disorders: Defective SA synthesis causes sialuria and defective SA catabolism causes sialidosis and sialic acid storage disease (SASD). These inborn errors of metabolism are characterised by increased urinary free SA.