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We describe a 70 year old woman affected by diffuse pulmonary lymphoid hyperplasia (DPLH). DPLH is a rare clinical-pathological entity generally associated with connective tissue diseases, but we diagnosed our case as an idiopathic DPLH. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case of idiopathic DPLH reported in medical literature.

We report a case of acute fibrinous and organising pneumonia in Whipple’s disease with lung improvement after antibiotic therapy. In our knowledge this is the first report of Whipple’s disease with acute fibrinous and organising pneumonia.

lung disease (RB-ILD), first described by Niewoehner et al in an autopsy study of cigarette smokers who died from non pulmonary causes in 1974, is a rare entity that should be distinguished from the other interstitial lung diseases and in particular from desquamative interstitial pneumonia, although the two conditions share a similar histopathological pattern. RB-ILD is clearly connected with tobacco smoking and has been inserted in the “smoking related interstitial lung diseases” together with DIP and Cell histiocytosis of Langerhans; it may also be associated with occupational exposure to machine fumes . The following is a case report of a patient with both smoking and occupational exposure.

The present study investigates the diagnostic significance of human mammaglobin (hMAM) mRNA expression in pleural effusions (PE) from breast cancer (BC) patients. Two hundred and fifty PE samples, including 32 from patients who had diagnosis of BC, 116 from patients with other cancers, and 102 from patients with benign diseases, were subjected to nested reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) for hMAM, and the results were compared with conventional cytology. hMAM was found expressed in 76/250 (30.4%) total PE and in 23/28 (sensitivity of 82.1%) of the PE subgroup owing to metastasis from BC. The specificity for hMAM detection method was 75.7%, whereas accuracy, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value were 76.4%, 30.3%, and 97.1%, respectively. hMAM was also detected in 46/116 (39.6%) PE specimens from other types of cancer and in 7/102 (6.8%) from benign diseases. Comparative analysis of RT-PCR and cytology showed that 14 PE samples from metastatic BC (50%) were positive by both PCR and cytology, 9 (32.1%) were positive only by PCR and 5 (17.9%) were negative by both tests, whereas no cases were found of positive cytology with negative PCR. RT-PCR increased sensitivity of BC effusion detection to 32.1% (McNemar test, P=0.004). We demonstrated that RT-PCR for hMAM test was more sensitive than cytomorphology suggesting that, although hMAM is not BC specific, it may be useful in adjunct to cytology for the routine screening of malignant BC effusions.