Objective To investigate standard diagnosis and treatment of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leakage to improve the prognosis of the patients. Methods A retrospective study was done on 75 patients with CSF leakage from January 2004 to March 2007 in our hospital. There were 51 patients with rhinorrhea, nine with otorrhea and 15 with wound/incision leakage. Of all, 39 patients had traumatic leakage, 32 postoperative leakage and four spontaneous leakage. In the study, 23 patients were cured by position testing and drug therapy and 16 by cerebrospinal fluid drainage and/or wound debridement but 36 were treated with surgeries including craniotomy repair in 17, extracranial repair in 17 and CSF shunt in five (three received CSF shunt after repair). Results Of all, 64 patients were cured, 10 gained im-provement but one died. Conclusion Standard diagnosis and treatment of CSF leakage helps improve cure rate and reduce complications.

Objective To study the effect of interferon-gamma release assays (IGRAs) adenosine deaminase activity test (ADA) and tuberculosis antibody test (TB-ab) in diagnosis of tuberculous pleurisy.Materials Sixty-three patients with pleurisy were tested for IGRAs,ADA and tuberculosis antibody.Samples of blood were tested.IGRAs,ADA and tuberculosis antibody were diagnosed according to manufacturer' s instructions.Results Either of the method could detect several patients with tuberculous pleurisy.Tuberculosis antibody showed lowest sensitivity and specificity.In our experiments,ADA test only detected 58.14％ of patients,although specificity can be high.We detected highest percentage of tuberculous pleurisy (79.07％) in blood IGRAs,with a specificity of 70％.Conclusion Blood IGRAs are more effective than blood ADA and tuberculosis antibody test,and it is recommend that IGRAs should be used in diagnosis of tuberculous pleurisy.