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Background and Objectives: Nowadays sepsis is one of the major causes of mortality in severely ill patients in ICU. At least part of mortality rate in sepsis is due to fewer number of specific clinical symptoms for prompt diagnosis. Moreover, due to lack of specific marker for detection of this disease, problems occur in differentiation of infectious and non-infectious factors. In recent years, there have been some reports of increase in serum level of procalcitonin in these patients but the correlation between PCT with severity and outcome of disease in patients with sepsis in ICU is not yet known. The aim of this study was to examine the correlation between severity and outcome with procalcitonin (PCT) levels in these patients.Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on patients with bacterial infectious diseases in ICU. Sampling was don on day 1 and day 3 and day 7 of admission to ICU. A semi-quantitative PCT-Q test for measurement of procalcitonin was used. After that sepsis severity and outcome of disease were compared with procalcitonin levels. Data were then analyzed by SPSS and the results were compared using Pearson chi-square test. Results: Thirty five patients (22 men and 13 women) had internal criteria for inclusion in this study. Eighteen patients died. There was a direct correlation with severity of disease (p

Background: Tuberculosis is still one of the most important causes of mortality and morbidity in many countries and is the second only to human immunodeficiency virus as a cause of death worldwide resulting from a single infectious agent. In 1993, the World Health Organization declared tuberculosis a global public health emergency. Conven-tional methods for the diagnosis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) infections are time consuming, as MTB culture requires 3-8 weeks for growth. To determine the sensitivity of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC), we have evaluated Mycobacterium tuberculosis DNA in peripheral blood samples with PCR technique in adults with new cases of pulmonary and extra-pulmonary tuberculosis. Setting: Department of Infectious disease of Imam Khomeini Hospital, 2004- 2005, Tehran, Iran.Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we evaluated MTB DNA extracted from 3ml citrated peripheral blood samples from 95 adults with new cases of pulmonary and extra-pulmonary tuberculosis. DNA extraction was performed using a commercial PCR kit with IS1081 primers. For prevention of cross contamination and reduction of false positives, all steps were performed under laminar hood.Results: The 95 patients, 59 of whom were male, had a mean age 44.44 years (SD±20.26); 69 cases had pulmonary and 26 had extra-pulmonary tuberculosis. PCR was positive in 32 (33.7%) patients and negative in 63 (66.3%) cases. The overall sensitivity and accuracy of the PCR assay was 44.1% for pulmonary, 19.2% for extra-pulmonary and 10% for disseminated tuberculosis, respectively.Conclusion: The low sensitivity of the IS1081 primer MTB-PCR assay on PBMC may pose problems for the rapid diagnosis of tuberculosis. However, further studies are needed to confirm this technique as an alternative test for the diagnosis of tuberculosis.