Designation of clinical status was performed by an investigator who was blinded to qPCR results, with host factors, clinical criteria, and microbiological criteria abstracted from the medical record and entered into a relational database.
His status was undetermined.
The final determination of the patient's status was done retrospectively, without knowledge of plasma cytokine and PCT levels, on the basis of the complete patient charts, results of microbiological cultures, chest radiographs and ultrasound, when available.
It is not clear to what extent the severity of illness at the moment of surgery or the microbiological status of the necrosis were confounding factors and were a bias in finding increased mortality rates for early surgery.
In a series of 56 patients who were treated surigically for severe acute pancreatitis, no effect of the timing of surgery was found if perioperative factors such as severity of illness and microbiological status of the necrosis were considered.
In future studies on the effect of timing of surgery, the severity of organ dysfunction and microbiological status at surgery should be evaluated as possible confounding variables.
(EFSA 2006) Furthermore, the COC's March 2006 minutes on the publication of the ERF aspartame study (Soffritti et al. 2006) concluded, … [I]n view of the problems in the design of the study and some concerns about the microbiological status of the colony, it was not possible to draw conclusions about the potential carcinogenicity of aspartame from the results.
When a batch of food is sampled to determine the microbiological status of the batch, the effectiveness of the sampling programme is also related to the spatial distribution of the microorganisms that are being sampled for.
Therefore, close attention should be paid to the microbiological status of these chronic wounds.
The technologist performing the TSPOT- TB assays was not aware of patients' clinical or microbiological status.
