Uniportal VATS: the first German experience.

Background: The acceptance of uniportal video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) for minor and major thoracic procedures is growing in Europe. This study presents the first experience with uniportal VATS in Germany.

Methods: In a retrospective study of prospectively collected data, 56 uniportal VATS were analyzed between 06/2012 and 06/2014.

[Pneumothorax].

The presence of air between the visceral pleura and the parietal pleura with consecutive retraction of the lung from the chest wall is called pneumothorax. Regarding the genesis of the pneumothorax, a distinction is drawn between spontaneous and traumatic pneumothorax. The spontaneous pneumothorax is, depending on whether a congenital or an acquired pulmonary disease can be found, grouped into a primary spontaneous pneumothorax (PSP) without underlying lung disease and a secondary spontaneous pneumothorax (SSP) with the presence of a known lung disease.

Interleukin 32 promotes hematopoietic progenitor expansion and attenuates bone marrow cytotoxicity.

The identification of soluble factors involved in stem cell renewal is a major goal in the assessment of the BM niche. We have previously shown that human endothelial cell (EC) supernatants can induce the proliferation of hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPCs), especially after stimulation with IL-1β. To identify new potential growth factors, we compared the expression profile of IL-1β-stimulated ECs over 4, 8 and 16 h with non-stimulated ECs using oligonucleotide microarrays covering more than 46,000 transcripts.

Hepatitis C virus transmission in a pediatric oncology ward: analysis of an outbreak and review of the literature.

Hospital-related hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections continue to occur even after the introduction of blood donor screening. We report an outbreak of HCV in nine patients of a pediatric oncology ward in 1996/1997. Sequencing of the hypervariable genomic region 1 (HVR1) of the E2/NS1 region showed near identity between HCV isolates from these patients as evidence for infection with the same virus.

[Tufted angioma].

We present a 2-year-old boy with a red, cutaneous-subcutaneous, nodule on the right elbow and a 2.5 year-old girl with an red-brown, indurated plaque on the left knee. Colour-coded doppler sonography of the boy's lesion showed vascular structures.