A retrospective study of children aged 29 days to 17 years who were admitted between January 1st and December 31th, 2009, with cerebrospinal fluid pleocytosis (white blood cell >= 7 mu L-1) was conducted. The cases of traumatic lumbar puncture and of antibiotic treatment before lumbar puncture were excluded. There were 295 patients with cerebrospinal

fluid pleocytosis, 60.3% females, medium age 5.0 +/- 4.3 years distributed as: 12.2% 1-3 months; 10.5% 3-12 months; 29.8% 12 months to 5 years; 47.5% >5 years. Thirty one children (10.5%) were diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, 156 (52.9%) viral meningitis and 108 (36.6%) aseptic meningitis. Bacterial meningitis was caused by Neisseria meningitidis (48.4%), Streptococcus pneumoniae NCT-501 purchase (32.3%), other Streptococcus species (9.7%), and other Fludarabinum agents (9.7%). cerebrospinal fluid white blood cell count was significantly

higher in patients with bacterial meningitis (mean, 4839 cells/mu L) compared to patients with aseptic meningitis (mean, 159 cells/mu L, p < 0.001), with those with aseptic meningitis (mean, 577 cells/mu L, p < 0.001) and with all non-bacterial meningitis cases together (p < 0.001). A cutoff value of 321 white blood cell/mu L showed the best combination of sensitivity (80.6%) and specificity (81.4%) for the diagnosis of bacterial meningitis (area under receiver operating characteristic curve 0.837). Therefore, the value of cerebrospinal fluid white blood cell count was found to be a useful and rapid diagnostic test to distinguish between bacterial and nonbacterial meningitis in children. (c) 2013 Elsevier Editora Ltda. All rights reserved.”
“A rapid and sensitive liquid chromatography/tandem

mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method was developed and validated for the determination of asiaticoside in beagle dog plasma. Plasma samples were extracted by protein precipitation with methanol. The chromatographic separation was performed on a C-18 column with the isocratic mobile phase comprising of 78% methanol in water and 10 mM ammonium acetate buffer. Asiaticoside and the IS were detected with a triple-quadrupole tandem mass spectrometer in the negative ion mode for drug quantification. The total analytical run time was relatively short (4 min), and the limit of assay quantification LY411575 (LLOQ) was 2.4 ng/mL using 300 mu L of dog plasma. Asiaticoside and the internal standard (nimodipine) were monitored in the multi-reaction-monitoring (MRM) mode as follows: m/z 957.4–>469.4 and m/z 417.2–>122.0, respectively. The standard curve was linear over a concentration range from 2 to 190 ng/mL, and the correlation coefficients were greater than 0.998. The recoveries of asiaticoside from plasma were larger than 81.7%, and RSD of inter-day and intra-day assay were below 8.2%. The validated method was firstly applied to investigate the pharmacokinetics of asiaticoside in dogs.