The prevalence of autoimmune diseases in the population - 3 to 5% - underlines the importance of autoantibody diagnostics in the public health sector. Autoimmune thyroid diseases are currently considered to be the most common autoimmune diseases, followed by rheumatoid arthritis, antiphospholipid syndrome and autoimmune liver diseases. The volume "Autoantibodies in Systemic Autoimmune Diseases" meets the requirements of a comprehensive and useful reference book for the serological diagnosis of systemic autoimmune diseases.

Hemodialysis: Dialysis water free of bacterial contamination and void of chemical contaminants is of paramount importance, and continuous actions should be taken to improve and maintain its status, Carlo Boccato and colleagues emphasize in their textbook "Water and Dialysis Fluids - a quality management guide".

Dialysis water purity requirements have evolved over time to satisfy new therapeutic objectives in the renal replacement therapy field.

New research looking at the cosmological constant problem suggests the expansion of the universe could be an illusion.

Rekonstruktive urologische Chirurgie: Nach einer Zystektomie ist für die Mehrheit der PatientInnen ein orthotoper Harnblasenersatz indiziert. Urologen der Universitätsklinik Ulm empfehlen die Versorgung mit der Ileum-Neoblase nach Hautmann und stellen die Vorgehensweise detailliert im Standardwerk "Rekonstruktive urologische Chirurgie" vor.

A gold-standard clinical trial suggests that "reanimating" donated hearts is a viable strategy for expanding the pool of potential heart donors. A method for "reanimating" organ donors' hearts works just as well as the standard approach to collecting hearts for transplantation, new trial data shows. If widely applied, the method could increase the heart donor pool by an estimated 30%.

Mary Ellen Olbrisch and colleagues (Virginia Commonwealth University/USA) evaluated 150 persons seeking to become adult-to-adult living liver donors. Most donor candidates had at least completed high school (90,5%), 65% had signed an organ donor card, 78% had been blood donors, , 64% had been involved in some volunteer activities.

PITTSBURGH, Pa. (Ivanhoe Newswire) – Blood – we can’t live without it. It makes up seven percent of our body weight. And this year, four and a half million people will need a blood transfusion. Blood banks continue to face dire shortages as supplies have failed to reach their pre-pandemic levels. In fact, a fifth of blood centers nationwide have less than a day’s supply of blood. And according to America’s blood centers, 29 percent have just enough to last two days. That’s why researchers are now working on ways to create blood in the lab, synthetic blood.

A new theory has radically revised Stephen Hawking's 1974 theory of black holes to predict that all objects with mass may eventually disappear. Stephen Hawking's most famous theory about black holes has just been given a sinister update — one that proclaims that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate.

Do intelligent people think faster? Researchers at the BIH and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, together with a colleague from Barcelona, made the surprising finding that participants with higher intelligence scores were only quicker when tackling simple tasks, while they took longer to solve difficult problems than subjects with lower IQ scores. In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced synchrony between brain areas literally “jump to conclusions” when making decisions, rather than waiting until upstream brain regions could complete the processing steps needed to solve the problem.

Earth probably shouldn't exist. 

That's because the orbits of the inner solar system planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — are chaotic, and models have suggested that these inner planets should have crashed into each other by now. And yet, that hasn't happened.

New research published May 3 in the journal Physical Review X(opens in new tab) may finally explain why. 

Through a deep plunge into the models for planetary motion, the researchers discovered that the motions of the inner planets are constrained by certain parameters that act as a tether that inhibits the system's chaos. Besides providing a mathematical explanation for the apparent harmony in our solar system, the new study's insights may help scientists understand the trajectories of exoplanets surrounding other stars.