OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the fetal fibronectin as a diagnostic method of preterm rupture of membanes and its clinical usefulness compared with standard tests. STUDY DESIGN: Seventy-eight women who had recieved antenatal care and complained of fluid leakage prior to 37 weeks were enrolled in this study. Standard tests-vaginal peculum examination, Nitrazine test, transabdominal sonography-were perfomed. Rupture of membranes was diagnosed if any two of the standard tests were positive. Fetal fibronectin in posterior vaginal fornix was determined qualitatively by ROM kit (Adeza Biochemical, Sunnyvale, USA). RESULTS: The sensitivity of fetal fibronectin for prediction of rupture of membranes in the women who complained of fluid leakage was 90.6% and its specificity, positive and negative predictive value were 65.7%, 76.4% and 85.1% respectively. 12 women were not diagnosed as rupture of membrane on standard tests but were positive for fetal fironectin. CONCLUSION: Fetal fibronectin would be a useful diagnotic method for rupture of membranes, especially in the women who complained of fluid leakage but not diagnosed by standard tests.
Female ; Fibronectins* ; Humans ; Membranes* ; Rupture ; Sensitivity and Specificity

The recent coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was declared as a public health emergency by the World Health Organisation on 30th January 2020, and has now affected more than 100 countries. Healthcare institutions and governments worldwide have raced to contain the disease, albeit to varying degrees of success. Containment strategies adopted range from complete lockdowns to remaining open with public advisories regarding social distancing. However, general principles adopted by most countries remain the same, mainly to avoid gatherings in large numbers and limit social interactions to curb the spread of disease. In Singapore, this disease had a very different progression. The first wave of the disease started with the confirmation of the first COVID-19 positive patient in Singapore on 23rd January 2020. Initially, the daily number of confirmed cases were low and manageable. With a rise in unlinked cases, the Disease Outbreak Response System Condition (DORSCON) status was raised from yellow to orange. New cluster outbreaks in foreign worker dormitories led to the rampant spread of disease, with daily spikes of COVID-19 cases. As of 7th June 2020, we have a total of 37,910 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infections, the highest in Southeast Asia, 12,999 active cases and a manageable mortality count of 25 deaths. This details our unique method for dealing with a pandemic, including a brief demographic of trauma patients during this period. We were able to conserve sufficient resources to ensure that our essential services can still continue. Moving on, we have to ensure the continued protection of our population, especially the vulnerable groups such as the elderly and the immunocompromised, as we reopen.

To address the increasing need for detecting and validating protein biomarkers in clinical specimens, mass spectrometry (MS)-based targeted proteomic techniques, including the selected reaction monitoring (SRM), parallel reaction monitoring (PRM), and massively parallel data-independent acquisition (DIA), have been developed. For optimal performance, they require the fragment ion spectra of targeted peptides as prior knowledge. In this report, we describe a MS pipe-line and spectral resource to support targeted proteomics studies for human tissue samples. To build the spectral resource, we integrated common open-source MS computational tools to assemble a freely accessible computational workflow based on Docker. We then applied the workflow to gen-erate DPHL, a comprehensive DIA pan-human library, from 1096 data-dependent acquisition (DDA) MS raw files for 16 types of cancer samples. This extensive spectral resource was then applied to a proteomic study of 17 prostate cancer (PCa) patients. Thereafter, PRM validation was applied to a larger study of 57 PCa patients and the differential expression of three proteins in prostate tumor was validated. As a second application, the DPHL spectral resource was applied to a study consisting of plasma samples from 19 diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) patients and 18 healthy control subjects. Differentially expressed proteins between DLBCL patients and healthy control subjects were detected by DIA-MS and confirmed by PRM. These data demonstrate that the DPHL supports DIA and PRM MS pipelines for robust protein biomarker discovery. DPHL is freely accessible at https://www.iprox.org/page/project.html?id=IPX0001400000.