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Serological Widal test is a fast, reliable and easy to perform and this test still is a suitable diagnostic method for diagnosing of typhoidal disease in many clinical laboratories. However, there are some doubtful reports regarding diagnostic value and credibility of this test, which was a motivation for present research. In this study, a total of 378 patients in two groups including 182 typhoidal patients with positive culture for Salmonella Typhi and para-Typhi A, B, C and 196 non-typhoidal febrile patients with negative culture for Salmonella, were studied in Hamadan city during 1994-97. All patients had at least one Widal test. In first group, 52.7% of patients have a titer of ?1:40 using anti-O (A, B, D) and 42.3% of patients also have a titer of ?1:80 using anti-O (A, B, D). In second group, 7.2% of patients have a titer of ?1:40 and 5.6% of them have a titer of ?1:80. In first group, 66.4% of patients had positive blood culture for S.typhi, however, 31.3% of them had positive antibody for OD titer. The results of this study indicated that sensitivity of Widal test for titer of ?1:80 was 86%, specificity 64% and PPV 42% and NPV 95%, therefore the negative Widal test did not have significant effect on the clinical diagnosis of typhoid disease.

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Background and Objective: Despite enormous progress in the understanding of human reproductive physiology, the underlying cause of male infertility remains undefined in about 50.0% of cases, which are referred to as idiopathic infertility and affects about 5.0-7.0% of the general male population. Human apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease (ApE1) is a multifunctional protein that has an important role in the base excision repair (BER) pathway. ApE1 SNP T>G found in exon 5 led to substitution of Asp>Glu at codon 148. This study was done to evaluate the association of ApE1 Asp148Glu polymorphism and the risk of idiopathic male infertility. Methods: In this case-control study, blood samples were collected from 90 patients diagnosed with idiopathic male infertility and 90 healthy men, genotyped by Allele-Specific PCR (AS-PCR) method by using specific primers that were designed and the association between genotype and allele frequencies in cases and controls were estimated. Results: There was no significant association between ApE1 gene polymorphism at codon 148 in case and control groups. Conclusion: No significant association was found between the Asp148Glu polymorphism and idiopathic male infertility.