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To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2009.12.042 Byline: M. Falcon (a), F. Valero (a), M. Pellegrini (b), M.C. Rotolo (b), G. Scaravelli (b), J. Joya (c), O. Vall (c), O. Garcia Algar (c), A. Luna (a), S. Pichini (b) Keywords: Drug abuse; Pregnancy; Induced abortion Abstract: Drug abuse is a worldwide phenomenon with significant health and socioeconomic impact and it is of particular concern in women of reproductive age and in pregnant women. We aimed to investigate the prevalence of drug use by serum and hair testing in a cohort of pregnant women at 12th week gestation who decided voluntarily to interrupt their pregnancy and to investigate the relationship between drug exposure and induced abortions (IA), repeated IA and contraception. The study was conducted in an obstetrics clinic authorised to perform IA in Murcia, Spain during an 18 months period (2007-2009). Apart from serum and/or hair testing, the 142 women enrolled in the study completed a detailed questionnaire regarding drug, alcohol and tobacco use in the previous 3 months. Serum and hair samples were analyzed by gas chromatography mass spectrometry assays. Hair and serum samples showed a 30% overall positivity to drugs of abuse. Of these samples, 20.4, 14.1, 4.2 and 1.4% were positive for cannabinoids, cocaine, opiates, and MDMA, respectively, with polydrug use in 5.6% cases. In this cohort, a positive association was found between drug use and repeated IA. The results highlight the need for promoting pregnancy planning for young women in general, especially when consuming psychoactive substances as well as promote safe and accessible contraception in women of reproductive age. In women requesting IA, specific drug abuse counselling should be implemented. Author Affiliation: (a) Legal Medicine, University of Murcia, Spain (b) Istituto Superiore di Sanita, Rome, Italy (c) Paediatric Service, URIE, Hospital del Mar, and Universitat AutA[sup.2]noma, Barcelona, Spain Article History: Received 17 June 2009; Accepted 25 July 2009

Recent studies have confirmed the wide consumption of tobacco and alcohol in our society and the strong addiction generated by these substances, which is responsible for high public health expenditure. Understanding the biological mechanisms of nicotine and/or alcohol dependence should have huge public health repercussions in the future. The aim of this review was to analyze the main human genes and polymorphisms related to nicotine and/or alcohol addiction, to help understand the biological mechanisms involved and which may be useful for developing new treatments in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The Child-Pugh and model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) scores are widely used to predict the outcomes of liver transplant (LT). Both have similar prognostic values in most cases, although their benefits might differ in some specific conditions. The aim of our study was to analyze the influence of pre-transplant ascites and encephalopathy in post-transplant liver rejection development and survival in alcohol cirrhosis (AC) patients undergoing LT to determine the usefulness of the Child-Pugh score for the assessment of prognosis in such patients.Material and Methods: Two hundred and eighty-one AC patients, classified according to viral infections and pre-transplant complications, were analyzed. Acute (AR) and chronic (CR) liver rejections and Child-Pugh, MELD and albumin-bilirubin (ALBI) scores were studied in all cases.Results: Similar AC rejection percentages were observed in ascites or encephalopathy groups (18.5% and 16.5%, p = 0.735), although a higher but not statistically significant AC rate was observed in patients with grade III ascites (p = 0.777) and with grade II encephalopathy (p = 0.089). Chronic rejection was only developed by 9.1% of AC patients, regardless of the presence of ascites (6.2%) or encephalopathy (5.5%). The presence of ascites and encephalopathy complications did not seem to influence post-transplant survival. Neither the Child-Pugh nor the ALBI score can be considered the best for predicting patient survival in the short or long term.Conclusions: Ascites and encephalopathy do not seem to influence AC or CR in patient survival, regardless of the presence of viral infections, so in our study neither the Child-Pugh nor ALBI score seems to be the best score to predict the outcomes of these patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-mortem biochemistry as a tool for the establishment of post-mortem interval (PMI) and the nature of death is very useful in Legal Medicine. Currently, several matrices are used for these investigations, although vitreous humour is the most useful for biochemical analysis due to its stability and low susceptibility to autolytic changes. The purpose of this study was to analyse to what extent the nature of death could influence in the measurement of parameters such us potassium (K+), hypoxanthine (Hx) and uric acid in the establishment of PMI. Samples of vitreous humour were collected from the eyes of 250 dead bodies (174 males, 76 females) with a mean age of 58.75 ± 20.84 years, mean PMI of 15.56 ± 6.21 hours post-mortem (hpm) and different causes of death, including natural (n = 148) and violent (n = 101) deaths. The vitreous humour was treated and the resultant supernatant was used for the biochemical analysis. Multichannel Autoanalyser was used to determine the concentrations of K+ and uric acid (mmol/L), and Hx (µmol/L) was quantified by HPLC-UV. The results showed the measurement of K+, Hx and uric acid together could be a complementary tool for establishing the PMI because these parameters provide good results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]