[ relation between psychopathology and severity of chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases]

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease[COPD] is one of the most common lung diseases in which the chronic duration of disease and disability can cause COPD exacerbation. Since there is insufficient dataavailable for this caseinIran, we have investigatedthepsychopathological featuresof these patients. In a descriptive analytic study, from March to September 2008, amongpatients of respiratoryclinicat Ghaem Hospitalof Mashhad city, in northeastern part of Iran, 43 people who werediagnosedwith COPD were selected via a convenience sampling and a spirometry was performed. A clinicalpsychologistassessedthe mentalstatus ofthe patients with the Symptom Checklist-90-R [SCL-90-R] instrument,and theHamilton andBeck Depression Inventory. Data were analyzed using theSPSS-14software and tests such as t-test, ANOVA and Pearson. Mean score for Global Severity Index [GSI] was 0.56 for men and 0.98 for women, and 51.2% of patients had developedmorbid psychopathologicalstatus. 51.8% of the patients were clinicallydepressed and 46.5% of them had abnormalanxiety. Women are more prone to experiencing symptoms such as depression, anxiety, phobia and physical disorders [P<0.05]. Patients with severe COPD were more depressed in compare to patients with mild and moderate COPD [P=0.01 and P=0.03, respectively]. Patients with COPD had high scores of psychopathological status. Depression is more prevalent among women diagnosed with COPD which is directly proportional to the severity of disease

Evaluation of polymerase chain reaction for diagnosis of "tuberculous pleurisy"

Differential diagnosis between tuberculous pleurisy [TBP] and non-tuberculosis pleural effusion represents a critically important clinical problem. In recent years, several noninvasive methods have been found for diagnosis of tuberculous pleurisy. This study aimed to evaluate the value of detection of the genome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis [MTB] by polymerase chain reaction [PCR] method for the diagnosis of tuberculous pleurisy and compare the results with those of conventional methods. In this cross-sectional study, we studied 62 patients [42 men and 20 women] with pleural effusion in Ghaem Hospital, affiliated to Mashhad University of Medical Sciences from January 2006 to June 2007. A total of 20 patients had tuberculous pleurisy [45.4%], 15 patients had malignant pleural effusion [34%], 3 patients had pleural effusion with various "non-tuberculosis non-malignant" etiologies [6.8%] and 6 patients had transudative pleural effusion [13.6]. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of PCR in tuberculous pleurisy were 85%, 100%, 100% and 88.8%, respectively. The value of PCR test and pleural biopsy was similar in the diagnosis of TBP. However, PCR detected MTB in pleural effusion when conventional pleural biopsy failed to do so