Upper gastrointestinal bleeding in a young female with AIDS: a case report.

Upper gastrointestinal haemorrhage (UGIH) is a surprisingly common condition in patients with AIDS (PWAs), affecting at least 6%. With the growing number of PWAs and their increasing life span, UGIH will certainly gain importance as a diagnostic and therapeutic challenge to health-care professionals, especially in central and eastern Europe because of the AIDS epidemics rapidly developing in that region. With the scarcity of reported cases, lack of management guidelines of UGIH in PWAs, and limited therapeutic possibilities in developing countries, important therapeutic problems should be anticipated. We present a case of UGIH in a female PWA due to ketoprofen overuse, successfully managed with conservative treatment.

Insidious course of cytomegalovirus infection in hand transplant recipient: case report, diagnostics, and treatment.

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection is common in solid organ and composite tissue transplant recipients and so becomes an ever more important issue for clinicians of every specialty. In this article we describe a case of CMV infection in a hand transplant recipient, which led to an episode of acute rejection early posttransplantation that was unresponsive to antiviral therapy. Our observations support the guidelines of matching CMV-positive donors with CMV-positive recipients only; however, the possible consequences related to CMV disease make a strong point to advocate the use of CMV prophylaxis in all hand transplant recipients.

Transplanted fingerprints: a preliminary case report 40 months posttransplant.

For the past century, fingerprints have been considered permanent and specific for each individual. However, with the advances in transplantology, fingerprints have lost their permanence. Because no study has yet been described, we examined possible changes in the fingerprint pattern of a transplanted hand. In 2006, we performed a hand transplantation on a 32-year-old man. The donor was revealed to have had a criminal record; his fingerprints were stored in the Polish automated fingerprint identification system. A forensic technician fingerprinted the transplanted hand nine times between June 2006 and September 2009. The appearance of minutiae and white lines and the change in the distance between papillary ridges were assessed in the thumbprints of the transplanted hand. The appearance of white lines was only temporary; at no point did they impair fingerprint identification. No significant changes occurred in the distance between the friction ridges. The observed small differences were ascribed to the two techniques used to collect the prints (spoon vs rolling). The number of minutiae ranged from 1 to 3, reaching a maximum in the third posttransplant month. A 40-month observation showed no significant changes in the fingerprints of the transplanted hand. Nevertheless, a long-term study is needed because of the risk of chronic rejection. The noninvasiveness of dactylography argues for inspecting its application to diagnose acute rejection. Finally, lawmakers should be made aware of the personal-protection issues related to the growing number of hand-transplant recipients.