Clinical value of automatic reporting of estimated glomerular filtration rate in geriatrics.

Background: Geriatric patients frequently have impaired renal function. Multimorbidity leads to polypharmacy with high risk of adverse drug reactions.

Objective: The aim was to evaluate the prevalence of renal impairment and risk of overdosing renally excreted drugs in hospitalized geriatric patients.

[Does an association between increased homocystein levels and cognitive dysfunction also exist in multimorbid geriatric patients].

Background: Total blood homocysteine (Hcys) and folate have been investigated in association with cognitive dysfunction (CD) in healthy but not in multimorbid elderly patients. We hypothesized that total Hcys and folate are adequate markers to identify multimorbid elderly patients with CD.

Methods: According to the Short Performance Cognitive Test (SKT) CD was determined in a cross-sectional study with 189 (131 f/58 m) multimorbid elderly patients with a mean age of 78.

Comparison of immunoassays for the detection of anti-GAD65 autoantibodies in patients with diabetes mellitus.

Recent studies have demonstrated that a combination of GAD-antibody assays and IA-2 autoantibody assays show a high diagnostic specificity for Type 1 diabetes. For this reason there is increasing interest in the use of GAD-antibody measurement for Type 1 risk assessment. Since a number of different assays have been published and documented in the literature, the aim of this study was to evaluate four different anti-GAD test systems that are commercially available in Germany.