Role of quantiferon TB gold assays in monitoring the efficacy of antituberculosis therapy

The impact of antituberculous treatment on [IFN]-gamma response to mycobacterial tuberculosis antigens have been widely investigated but the results have been controversial. To evaluate the role of Quantiferon TB gold assays as one of the interferon-gamma release assays [IGRAs] for monitoring the efficacy of antituberculosis therapy in patients with active disease. Thirty patients with active pulmonary TB were enrolled in this cross-sectional study where they were subjected to history taking, clinical examination, chest X-ray, direct smear examination of sputum samples for AFB using Ziehl-Neelson stain performed on three visits; up on enrollment, 2 and 6 months later. Lowenstein Jensen medium cultures of sputum samples were done for isolation of Mycobacterium tuberculosison first visit. All patients in the study group were subjected to QuantiFERON-TB Gold estimation on the three visits. The mean sensitivity and specificity of QFT-G test was 85.9% and 62.6% respectively. Using [2] analysis, there was a statistically significant association between QFT-G results and culture results upon enrollment and Acid fast bacilli positivity on second and third visits. Studying the changes in QFT-G results throughout the whole study period revealed a statistically significant decrease in number of QFT-G positive cases from 24/29 patients [82.8%] at first visit to 4/25 patients [16%] at the third visit. All 21/25 patients [84%] who became QFT-G negative at the end of the study had a complete clinical and microbiological recovery of the TB disease. The analysis of QFT-G assay results showed that in the majority of our TB patients there was a correlation between clinical treatment outcome and changes of IFN-gamma response to M. tuberculosis-specific antigens

Ions as markers of the vitality of the wound and their postmortem stability

The diagnostic value of new markers of wound vitality such as the ions Ca, Mg, Cu, Zn and Fe, in addition to the influence of putrefaction on them, have been studied in this work. For this purpose, vital wounds were inflicted to three horses, which were killed 20 min. later. Ten minutes after death, wounds were excised with 5-6 cm skin around the incision and maintained at the ambient temperature. After varying periods of postmortem interval from 0 to 48 h, aliquots of each wound were taken and analyzed with atomic absorption spectrophotometry for ions. The present results demonstrated that the metal ions levels estimation in the skin injury edge may be a useful method to differentiate vital from postmortem wounds, in addition, ions conserve their diagnostic ability after the influence of putrefaction