Background: Legionella pneumophila (L. pneumophila) is gram-negative bacterium, which causes Legionnaires’ disease as well as Pontiac fever. Objective: To determine the frequency of Legionella pneumophila in pneumonic patients, to determine the clinical utility of diagnosing Legionella pneumonia by urinary antigen testing (LPUAT) in terms of sensitivity and specificity, to compares the results obtained from patients by urinary antigen test with q Real Time PCR (RT PCR) using serum samples and to determine the frequency of serogroup 1 and other serogroups of L. pneumophila. Methods: A total of 100 pneumonic patients (community acquired pneumonia) were enrolled in this study during a period between October 2016 to April 2017; 92 samples were collected from patients attended and admitted to Al-Imamein Al-Kadhimein Medical City and 8 samples from those in the (Center of Kidney Diseases and Transplantation) in the Medical City of Baghdad. All patients were under therapy with antibiotics. Serum and urine specimens were obtained from all patients; urine samples were processed for urinary antigen test (rapid test). Serum samples were collected and submitted to DNA extraction for detection of L. pneumophila mip gene by q RT PCR assay. Results: The percentage of L. pneumophila in two hospitals in Bagdad was 30%. Of these 26% was serogroup 1 detected by urinary antigen testing (UAT). In the other hand, 23% of samples were positive by q RT PCR based mip gene, of these 19 % were serogroup 1 and 4% were another serogroup. The sensitivity of UAT is high (P value < 0.001), which means statistically highly significance than q RT PCR. Conclusion: LPUAT is a rapid tool for early diagnosis of Legionella infection, which highlights the need of using this test in hospitals and health institutions and there is a high prevalence of L. pneumophila in Iraq that refer to the necessity of considering this microorganism point of view in future studies for detection and treatment in pneumonic patients. Keywords: L. pneumophila, mip gene, quantitative real time PCR, urinary antigen. Citation: Gauad SA, Abdulrahman TR, Muhamad AK, Jawad AA, Hassan JS. Clinical utility of urinary antigen test and molecular method for detection of Legionella pneumophila. Iraqi JMS. 2018; 16(2): 207-215. doi: 10.22578/IJMS.16.2.13
BACKGROUND: Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) is a proangiogenic factor that exerts different effects over stem cell survival growth, apoptosis, and adhesion. Its impact on leukemogenesis has been established by many studies. AIM: This study aimed to determine the effect of plasma HGF activity on acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients at presentation and after remission. PATIENTS AND METHODS: This was a cross-sectional prospective study of 30 newly-diagnosed, adult, and AML patients. All patients received the 7+3 treatment protocol. Patients’ clinical data were taken at presentation, and patients were followed up for 6 months to evaluate the clinical status. Plasma HGF levels were estimated by ELISA based methods in the pa
... Show MoreThe article aims to consider the concept of language metaphor in Russian and Arabic languages and the problem of metaphor functioning in language, since it is one of the most important figurative components of the structural organization of the text and an important means of reflecting the national culture of each people. and often in revealing the image of a metaphor one can feel the full flexibility of the language and its beauty.
Objective: Evaluation of women's knowledge about risk factors and early detection of breast cancer at
Ibn Rushd college of education in Baghdad University.
Methodology: The study sample included (184) women in the Ibn Rushd College / University of
Baghdad, whose age ranged between (17-58) years. Data were collected through a structured
questionnaire prepared by the National Cancer Research Center which were answered during a scientific
symposium about breast cancer. The score was calculated by correcting the results of the answer, giving
one score for each correct answer and then estimating the level of knowledge and inputting all data in a
statistical program.
Results: The results showed limited level of women's
Plagiarism is becoming more of a problem in academics. It’s made worse by the ease with which a wide range of resources can be found on the internet, as well as the ease with which they can be copied and pasted. It is academic theft since the perpetrator has ”taken” and presented the work of others as his or her own. Manual detection of plagiarism by a human being is difficult, imprecise, and time-consuming because it is difficult for anyone to compare their work to current data. Plagiarism is a big problem in higher education, and it can happen on any topic. Plagiarism detection has been studied in many scientific articles, and methods for recognition have been created utilizing the Plagiarism analysis, Authorship identification, and
... Show MoreVoice Activity Detection (VAD) is considered as an important pre-processing step in speech processing systems such as speech enhancement, speech recognition, gender and age identification. VAD helps in reducing the time required to process speech data and to improve final system accuracy by focusing the work on the voiced part of the speech. An automatic technique for VAD using Fuzzy-Neuro technique (FN-AVAD) is presented in this paper. The aim of this work is to alleviate the problem of choosing the best threshold value in traditional VAD methods and achieves automaticity by combining fuzzy clustering and machine learning techniques. Four features are extracted from each speech segment, which are short term energy, zero-crossing rate, auto
... Show MoreFor several applications, it is very important to have an edge detection technique matching human visual contour perception and less sensitive to noise. The edge detection algorithm describes in this paper based on the results obtained by Maximum a posteriori (MAP) and Maximum Entropy (ME) deblurring algorithms. The technique makes a trade-off between sharpening and smoothing the noisy image. One of the advantages of the described algorithm is less sensitive to noise than that given by Marr and Geuen techniques that considered to be the best edge detection algorithms in terms of matching human visual contour perception.