"Extrapolated" creatine kinase-BB isoenzyme activity in assessment of initial brain damage after severe head injury.

The severity of initial brain damage is an important risk factor in determining the prognosis of head trauma. It can be assessed by assigning neurological scores or by determining the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) activity of the isoenzyme creatine kinase-BB (CK-BB). In 10 severely head-injured patients serial CSF samples were obtained during the first 24 hours after trauma, and exponential decay of CK-BB activity with an average half-life of 4.5 hours was demonstrated. This finding led the authors to propose an "extrapolated" CK-BB activity, which theoretically occurs immediately after injury and is calculated from a single CK-BB recording, as a new index for assessing the degree of initial brain damage. In 50 patients with severe head injury, the prognostic ability of "observed" and "extrapolated" CK-BB activity was compared with two clinical scoring systems that evaluate severity of head trauma (the Glasgow and the Glasgow-Liege Coma Scales). "Extrapolated" CK-BB activity proved to be the best prognostic factor. With a CK-BB cutoff point of 330 U/liter, a true-positive rate of 79% and a true-negative rate of 73% were obtained. These results suggest the usefulness of measuring CK-BB activity in CSF as soon as possible after hospital admission for head injury

The influence of estuarine water quality on cover of barnacles and Enteromorpha spp

The influence of ambient water quality on the settlement of barnacles and the green alga Enteromorpha spp. to an artificial substratum in the estuaries of Sydney, Australia, was investigated to test the efficacy of both groups of organisms as indicators of changes in water quality due to urban stormwater runoff and/or sewage overflows. Wooden settlement panels were immersed for 4 months on 17 occasions between 1996 and 2005 at 11 locations known to vary in water-quality parameters (conductivity, total uncombined ammonia, oxidised nitrogen, total nitrogen, filterable phosphorus, total phosphorus, faecal coliforms and chlorophyll-α) and ambient meteorological conditions (total rainfall, maximum rainfall). Water-quality data were collected during the time that the settlement panels were deployed. Cover of barnacles was highly variable among locations (range 1.2–55.2%). Hierarchical partitioning found that chlorophyll-α, total phosphorus and total nitrogen had significant independent positive effects on barnacle cover. Together, these variables explained 26% of the variation in barnacle cover. Mean cover of Enteromorpha spp., however, did not vary significantly among locations suggesting that other potentially more important factors are influencing its settlement and growth. The results of this study suggest that barnacle cover is likely to be a useful indicator of some components of water quality