Therapy with antifungals decreases the diagnostic performance of PCR for diagnosing invasive aspergillosis in bronchoalveolar lavage samples of patients with haematological malignancies.

Objectives: Invasive aspergillosis (IA) is a life-threatening infection in severely immunocompromised patients, especially those receiving intensive chemotherapy or undergoing haematopoietic stem cell transplantation. As the clinical diagnosis of IA is mostly based on biomarkers (galactomannan, β-d-glucan, PCR assays) indicating Aspergillus as the underlying pathogen, the effect of antifungal treatment on the performance of these parameters is still controversial. We evaluated the effect of antifungal treatment on the performance of an Aspergillus-specific PCR assay in bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) samples.

C-reactive Protein in Patients with Metastatic Clear Cell Renal Carcinoma: An Important Biomarker for Tumor-associated Inflammation.

Two consecutive multi-center phase II trials were designed to prove the hypothesis, whether therapeutic modeling of tumor-associated inflammatory processes could result in improved tumor response.Therapy in both trials consisted of low-dose capecitabine 1g/m2 twice daily p.o.