Novel Insight into the Association between Balneotherapy and Functional State and Health Perception in Chronic Low Back Pain: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Epidemiological data indicate that low back pain (LBP) affected 619 million people globally in 2020, representing a significant health and economic burden. Additionally, chronic LBP (cLBP) strongly impairs quality of life and leads to disability and premature retirement, thus emphasizing the need for providing deeper insight into the factors that affect treatment outcomes and for offering thorough guidance for the assessment and management of this condition. Taking into consideration the rising prevalence of cLBP and the knowledge gap referring to the overall health benefits of balneotherapy (BT), the aim of this study was to assess the effects of BT on functional status, quality of life, and psychological symptoms in patients with cLBP.

The analysis of tobacco consumption in Croatia--are we successfully facing the epidemic?

Tobacco is the largest cause of morbidity and mortality. The aim of this study is to analyse several health and economically related indicators of tobacco consumption: smoking prevalence, standardized death rates (SDRs) from lung cancer and the proportion of GDP spent on tobacco in Croatia and other transitional countries--the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria. The overall smoking prevalence in Croatia decreased by 5.

Scaling-up undergraduate medical education: enabling virtual mobility by online elective courses.

Aim: To evaluate online elective courses at Croatian medical schools with respect to the virtual mobility of national teachers and students and virtual team collaboration.

Methods: A student-centered virtual learning environment developed within the framework of the European Union Tempus Programme allowed national educational services to design and deliver online undergraduate elective courses. Three online elective courses were created for second-year medical students of four Croatian medical schools by using Moodle, an open-source learning management system.

Adenocarcinoma of the uterine cervix: prognostic significance of clinicopathologic parameters, flow cytometry analysis and HPV infection.

Background: This study was designed to determine the possible impact of status of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection (no infection, single, multiple infections) on the survival of patients with cervical adenocarcinoma, to correlate the HPV status with other clinicopathologic parameters, and to examine clinical, histological and flow cytometric parameters as predictors of survival in cervical adenocarcinoma.

Methods: The clinical data of 51 patients with adenocarcinoma of the cervix who were treated at the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, Zagreb University School of Medicine, from 1978 to 2004 were analysed: age at presentation, menstrual status, clinical stage, relapse, survival. Exact histologic subtype, architectural grade and nuclear grade were determined.

Comparison of polymerase chain reaction and catalyzed signal amplification in situ hybridization methods for human papillomavirus detection in paraffin-embedded cervical preneoplastic and neoplastic lesions.

Background: Two molecular methods for HPV genotyping in formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue were evaluated: in house polymerase chain reaction assay (PCR) with consensus and type-specific primers and a novel procedure of in situ hybridization-a catalyzed signal amplification system (CSA-ISH, Genpoint, DAKO, Glostrup, Denmark). The number of HPV positive cases and detected viral types were compared in cervical biopsies and cone specimens according to histopathological diagnosis. Primer efficiency in detecting various types of HPV by PCR method was evaluated.