Development of automated assays for anticardiolipin antibodies determination: addressing antigen and standardization issues.

The lack of reliable standardization tools as well as the poorly defined nature of the "Cardiolipin antigen" makes the development of the anticardiolipin antibody (ACA) assays (for anti-IgG and IgM detection) highly challenging. This article describes how several issues have been solved during the development of an automated ACA immunoassays, based on a technology that includes paramagnetic microbeads as solid-phase reagents and chemiluminescence as a signal. The technology is adapted to an automatic immunoanalyzer, called LIAISON, which performs, in an automatic manner, the whole assay, starting from the primary tube of the bleeding to the display of the assay result.

Climacteric symptoms according to body weight in women of different socio-economic groups.

The people influence of body weight on the climacteric symptoms of 618 selected women in spontaneous post-menopause has been studied bases on data collected at a Geriatric Centre and subsequently incorporated into a postal questionnaire. These cases were divided into 3 groups according to the "obesity degree": (I) less than 5 kg (53.1% of the cases);(II) between 5 and 15 kg (31.