Children with celiac disease are at risk for reduced bone mineral density. A strict gluten-free diet improves bone mineralization, even in 1 year. Early diagnosis and treatment of celiac disease during childhood will protect the patient from osteoporosis.
Symptomatic H. pylori infection in a child should always be treated. The urea breath test is an accurate and reliable way to identify H. pylori-positive patients and to determine the response to treatment. Triple-agent therapy is effective for eradicating H. pylori infection in children and usually helps reduce or eliminate dyspeptic symptoms. The level of H. pylori resistance to metronidazole is high in our region. The significant rate of resistance to clarithromycin (18.1%) may explain the treatment failure observed in this study.
Infection with hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and syphilis are serious complications of blood transfusion. These infections are routinely screened by blood banks; such tests are obligatory for transfusion safety in Turkey. The results of screening 1 737 943 blood donations from blood centres in Istanbul between 1 January 1987 and 31 December 2003 for HBV, HCV, HIV and syphilis were analysed retrospectively. Hepatitis B surface antigen rates fell from 5.98% in 1987 to 2.07% in 2003. Anti-HCV seropositivity was found to be approximately 0.5%, whereas anti-HIV seropositivity was approximately 0.001%. Rapid plasma reagin rates (test for syphilis) were 0.04% in 1987, and increased to 0.2% in 2002. The decreasing trends observed in data from the 17-year period studied indicate the value of safety measures taken, in particular the implementation of donor screening procedures in 1997.
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