PLoS medicine
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A 54-year-old man presented with fever, shortness of breath, and left-sided pleuritic chest pain. His bilateral pleural effusions and pericardial effusion turned out to be due to sarcoidosis
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The ability to detect disease outbreaks early is important in order to minimize morbidity and mortality through timely implementation of disease prevention and control measures. Many national, state, and local health departments are launching disease surveillance systems with daily analyses of hospital emergency department visits, ambulance dispatch calls, or pharmacy sales for which population-at-risk information is unavailable or irrelevant. ⋯ If such results hold up over longer study times and in other locations, the space-time permutation scan statistic will be an important tool for local and national health departments that are setting up early disease detection surveillance systems.
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Meta Analysis
Serum uric acid and coronary heart disease in 9,458 incident cases and 155,084 controls: prospective study and meta-analysis.
It has been suggested throughout the past fifty years that serum uric acid concentrations can help predict the future risk of coronary heart disease (CHD), but the epidemiological evidence is uncertain. ⋯ Measurement of serum uric acid levels is unlikely to enhance usefully the prediction of CHD, and this factor is unlikely to be a major determinant of the disease in general populations.
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Lung adenocarcinomas from patients who respond to the tyrosine kinase inhibitors gefitinib (Iressa) or erlotinib (Tarceva) usually harbor somatic gain-of-function mutations in exons encoding the kinase domain of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). Despite initial responses, patients eventually progress by unknown mechanisms of "acquired" resistance. ⋯ In patients with tumors bearing gefitinib- or erlotinib-sensitive EGFR mutations, resistant subclones containing an additional EGFR mutation emerge in the presence of drug. This observation should help guide the search for more effective therapy against a specific subset of lung cancers.
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Clinical Trial
T cell epitope immunotherapy induces a CD4+ T cell population with regulatory activity.
Synthetic peptides, representing CD4(+) T cell epitopes, derived from the primary sequence of allergen molecules have been used to down-regulate allergic inflammation in sensitised individuals. Treatment of allergic diseases with peptides may offer substantial advantages over treatment with native allergen molecules because of the reduced potential for cross-linking IgE bound to the surface of mast cells and basophils. ⋯ This study provides evidence for the induction of a population of CD4(+) T cells with suppressor/regulatory activity following PIT. Furthermore, up-regulation of cell surface levels of CD5 may contribute to reduced reactivity to allergen.