Potential therapeutic targets to prevent organ damage in chronic pulmonary sarcoidosis.

Introduction: Sarcoidosis is a granulomatous inflammatory disease with high chances of reduced quality of life, irreversible organ damage, and reduced life expectancy when vital organs are involved. Any organ system can be affected, and the lungs are most often affected. There is no preventive strategy as the exact etiology is unknown, and complex immunogenetic and environmental factors determine disease susceptibility and phenotype.

Living at the end-of-life: experience of time of patients with cancer.

Background: The aim of this study was to gain insight into the experience of time of terminal patients with cancer. Experience of time is relevant in palliative care in both policy and practice. On a policy level, the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY), the most used outcome measure for cost-effectiveness analysis in healthcare, assumes time to be a linear and additive variable, which is one of the reasons that its applicability in palliative care is questioned.

Serum levels of neopterin during antimicrobial treatment for Mycobacterium ulcerans infection.

Neopterin is closely associated with activation of the cellular immune system. Neopterin levels differed between controls and patients with Buruli ulcer disease. No differences between patients with or without paradoxical responses were observed.

Paradoxical responses after start of antimicrobial treatment in Mycobacterium ulcerans infection.

Background:  Antimicrobial killing in mycobacterial infections may be accompanied by (transient) clinical deterioration, known as paradoxical reaction. To search for patterns reflecting such reactions in the treatment of Buruli ulcer (Mycobacterium ulcerans infection), the evolution of lesions of patients treated with antimicrobials was prospectively assessed.

Methods:  The lesion size of participants of the BURULICO antimicrobial trial (with lesions ≤10 cm cross-sectional diameter) was assessed by careful palpation and recorded by serial acetate sheet tracings.

A genotypic approach for detection, identification, and characterization of drug resistance in Mycobacterium ulcerans in clinical samples and isolates from Ghana.

Standardized antimycobacterial therapy is considered the treatment of choice for Buruli ulcer disease. To assess the prevalence of drug resistance among clinical Mycobacterium ulcerans isolates in Ghana, we conducted a sequence-based approach to detect mutations associated with drug resistance. We subjected clinical samples to direct DNA sequencing of rpoB and rpsL genes and compared culture and whole-genome extracts regarding the efficiency of sequence analysis; 99.