Anaphylactic shock due to cow's milk protein hypersensitivity in a breast-fed infant

A newborn infant developed anaphylactic shock three times, once after ingesting his mother's milk and once after ingesting a formula containing casein hydrolysate. Symptoms resolved after cow's milk was withdrawn from the mother's diet and lactation was resumed. The case demonstrates that anaphylactic shock may occur in breast-fed infants and emphasizes the need to consider allergic phenomena even in these infants.

Mycoses caused by Candida lusitaniae

Candida lusitaniae, a fungus with a low incidence of infection in immunocompetent people, is emerging as an opportunistic pathogen in immunocompromised hosts. This yeast is generally resistant to amphotericin B and may present therapeutic difficulties. C. lusitaniae may be misidentified as one of several other fungal species, including Candida tropicalis, Candida parapsilosis, and even Saccharomyces cerevisiae. As judged by in vitro antifungal susceptibility testing, minimal inhibitory concentrations of antifungal agents other than amphotericin B are achievable, but fungicidal levels are not. When encountered in blood or other body sites, C. lusitaniae should be carefully considered as a potential pathogen.

Behavior of Antithrombin III, Determined as Protein Concentration and Biologic Activity, in Subjects with Neoplastic Disease

Antithrombin III (AT III), the primary inhibitor of plasma protease coagulation proteins, was evaluated in groups of patients with different neoplastic disease. When compared with that of 25 healthy subjects, the mean value of AT III biologic activity was elevated in all groups, significantly in gastrointestinal (p < 0.02) and lung (p < 0.001) tumors, lymphoma (p < 0.02) and in the group with various primary cancers (p < 0.05). No difference was found between 46 patients tested under chemoradiotherapy and 216 patients who had not undergone therapy for at least 1 month. Four patients with clinical thrombosis had normal AT III biologic activity. Of the 262 patients studied, 14 had low AT III biologic activity without clinical thrombosis and normal protein concentration. In 71 patients (27%) an excess of immunoassayable protein of 20% or more over biologic activity was found. Double immunoelectrophoresis performed in 5 of these showed for 3 patients an enlarged second arc of precipitation. Moreover, no correlation was observed between the activity and protein AT III concentration (r = 0.05). The likelihood of the presence of circulating AT III-protease complexes is discussed.

A graph-theoretic method for decomposing two-dimensional polygonal shapes into meaningful parts

This note gives a new graph-theoretic shape decomposition procedure, extending the idea in the paper ``Decomposition of Two-Dimensional Shapes by Graph-Theoretic Clustering'' by Shapiro and Haralick [1]. A binary matrix is used in order to express the LI relation. A solution for the problems connected with artificial separation of two CS cliques and the presence of a regular concavity is proposed. Our algorithm produces nonoverlapping shape parts in much reduced execution time.

Granulocyte adherence in uremia and hemodialysis

To evaluate granulocyte function in uremia and hemodialysis we studied granulocyte adherence, an important step in chemotaxis. Our studies demonstrate that patients with severe impairment in renal function had normal granulocyte adherence (72.1 +/- 21 vs. 72.9 +/- 14% controls) while patients with end stage renal disease undergoing hemodialysis (45 +/- 30%) had significant impairment (p less than 0.001). Adherence worsened during dialysis (p less than 0.001) but returned towards the abnormal baseline values at the end of the procedure. There was a significant correlation between adherence and potassium (r=0.77; p less than 0.05) and adherence and sodium-potassium ratio (r=-0.78; p less than 0.05) before and after dialysis. Other factors such as changes in creatinine, urea nitrogen, osmolality, calcium, phosphorus or (H+) did not correlate with adherence. It is concluded that the abnormality in adherence is not the result of the basic disease process but a consequence of dialysis.