Factors affecting smear conversion in tuberculosis management

ABSTRACT Setting: Inpatient clinic at Ministry of Health Sureyyapasa Chest Diseases and Thoracic Surgery Training and Research Hospital Objective: To identify risk factors associated with persistent sputum positivity at the end of 2 months of direct observed treatment Design: Retrospective cohort study concerning evaluation of medical records of 547 patients with smear positive tuberculosis treated at our clinic from January 2004 to December 2005 Results: Of 547 patients with AFB positive smears, late conversion occurred in 11.9% while early conversion in 88.1%. Males composed 54.7% of the population, 31.9% of the population was ≤25 years old, 37.5% had exposure to tobacco, 15.7% had any drug resistance, 8.9% had co-morbid diabetes mellitus and 16.0% had extensive radiologic involvement. Based on significant association between sputum smear conversion and smoking for more than 20 package/year ( [Med-Science 2012; 1(4.000): 351-62

Epidemiology and distribution of interstitial lung diseases in Turkey

IntroductionThere is very few data on the epidemiological features of interstitial lung diseases (ILD) in the literature. These studies on this subject suffer from limited number of patients

Mutations in SLC34A2 Cause Pulmonary Alveolar Microlithiasis and Are Possibly Associated with Testicular Microlithiasis

Pulmonary alveolar microlithiasis (PAM) is a rare disease characterized by the deposition of calcium phosphate microliths throughout the lungs. We first identified a PAM locus by homozygosity mapping to 4p15, then identified, by a candidate-gene approach, the gene responsible for the disease as SLC34A2 (the type IIb sodium-phosphate cotransporter gene), which is involved in phosphate homeostasis in several organs. We identified six homozygous exonic mutations in the seven unrelated patients with PAM we studied. Three of the mutations were frameshifts, one was a chain termination, one was an amino acid substitution, and one was a deletion spanning the minimal promoter and the first exon. Absence of functional protein product of the gene is compatible with calcium phosphate deposition in alveolar airspaces. We show that impaired activity of the phosphate transporter is presumably responsible for the microliths and that PAM is a recessive monogenic disease with full penetrance. Testicular microlithiasis (TM) is a disease that is more common than PAM. It is often associated with cancer and infertility. Since the gene we identified is also expressed in testis, we searched for mutations in subjects with TM. In 2 of the 15 subjects with TM we studied, we identified two rare variants, one synonymous and the other noncoding, that are possibly associated with the condition