Objectives: This study was conducted to detect the biofilm formation in bacterial isolates from chronic wound infections.
Materials and Methods: In the present study, ninety two isolates from chronic wound infections were identified by MALDI-TOF-MS (bioMerieux) and VITEK-2-MS (bioMerieux). These isolates were further screened for biofilm formation by three methods i. e., Tissue Culture Plate method (TCP), Tube Method (TM) and Congo Red Agar (CRA) method. Impact of biofilm production was correlated with the antibiotic resistant pattern.
Statistical Analysis: Statistical analysis was done for all three methods considering TCP as Gold Standard and parameters like senitivity and specificity of TM i.e. 47.2 and 100% respectively.
Results: Out of 92 isolates, biofilm formation was seen in 72 isolates (78.2%) by TCP method. 64 isolates were strong biofilm producers, 8 isolates were moderate biofilm producers and 20 isolates were nonbiofilm producing. High prevalence of biofilm formation was seen in nonhealing ulcers infected with Staphylococcus aureus followed by Klebsiella pneumoniae.
Conclusion: Among three screening methods used for detection of biofilm production, TCP method is considered to be a standard and most reliable for screening of biofilm formation in comparison to TM and CRA.
Aim: The aim of this study was to identify the correlation between the recommendation which had been followed by two HD centers in different countries and the impact of that on the hepatitis C infection issue.
Methods: A cohort prospective and retrospective study was done in this research. The study included HD patients who were followed up for 9 months and who died in the last 5 years. Universal sampling was used to select the patients based on inclusion criteria.
Results: There was a significant relationship between HCV during the first checkup and HCV during the second checkup during the 9-month follow-up of HD patients in a HD center, Jakarta, Indonesia. The total number of patients who had hepatitis C during the first and second checkups was also different in this HD center.
Conclusion: Besides providing special HD rooms and machines for HD patients with hepatitis C, minimizing blood transfusion to the patients on HD is also important to reduce the chance for the patients to acquire hepatitis C and to increase the percentage of survival.
Objective: To compare the real-world effectiveness of EHRZ and FDC treatment groups on a cohort registry by investigating the sputum conversion rate and treatment outcomes of both groups.
Methods: A total of 11,489 patients' data were extracted from the Sabah TB registry between January 2012 and June 2016, including EHRZ (n = 4188) and FDC (n = 7301) patients. Then, 1:1 propensity score matching was adopted to reduce the baseline bias. Caliper matching was conducted with maximum tolerance score set at 0.001. Confounders included in the propensity score matching were gender, nationality, diabetes, HIV status, smoking status, and chest X-ray status. Successful matching provided 4188 matched pairs (n = 8376) for final analysis.
Results: In this matched cohort of 4188 pairs, the 2-month sputum conversion rate of FDC group was significantly higher than the EHRZ group (96.3% vs. 94.3%; P < 0.001) whereas 6-month sputum conversion of both groups showed no significant difference. Treatment outcomes such as noncompliance rate, failure rate, and success rate have no significant difference (P > 0.05) in both the treatment groups. There was an incidental finding of reduced death rate among FDC group compared to the EHRZ group (0.2% vs. 0.5%; P = 0.034).
Conclusion: The FDC formulation has better sputum conversion rate at 2 months compared to conventional EHRZ regime as separate-drug formulation. It was also observed that FDC has a slight protective effect against all-cause death among TB patients. This protective effect of FDC, however, still needs to be proven further.