Background: Osteoarthritis (OA) is a heterogeneous joint disorder traditionally considered mechanically driven; however, evidence indicates that inflammatory mechanisms contribute to symptom expression. Exploratory analyses of peripheral biomarkers may provide insights into systemic inflammation in symptomatic knee OA, but formal phenotypic validation requires dedicated clustering or longitudinal studies. Objective: To examine associations between clinical pain, functional impairment, and circulating inflammatory biomarkers in patients with knee OA compared with healthy controls. Methods: In this prospective, single-center study, patients aged 40–80 years with radiographically confirmed knee OA and chronic knee pain were compared with age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Pain intensity and functional status were assessed using the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and the Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (KOOS). Circulating inflammatory biomarkers, including cytokines and matrix metalloproteinases, were quantified using multiplex immunoassays. Statistical analyses included adjusted linear regression models, with age and BMI as covariates, and multiple testing correction using the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure (FDR alpha error 5%). Results: OA patients exhibited higher circulating levels of TNF-α, IL-6, IL-8, MMP-1, MMP-3, TNFSF13, TNFSF13B, and pentraxin-3 compared with controls (p < 0.01). No significant sex differences were observed. KOOSs correlated with IL-6 and IL-10 levels, suggesting an association between systemic inflammatory activity and functional limitation. All findings are presented as exploratory and associative. Conclusions: Patients with knee OA display systemic inflammatory biomarker differences associated with pain and functional impairment. These results support the role of inflammation in OA symptoms within an exploratory framework. Larger, longitudinal studies are warranted to validate these observations.

Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) continues to pose one of the most significant challenges in maternal health, affecting nearly 40% of pregnant women worldwide according to the World Health Organization (2023).  Despite advances in obstetric screening, conventional diagnostic methods such as complete blood count (CBC) tests often fail to detect early or latent stages of anemia due to physiological changes associated with pregnancy.  This study introduces a robust machine learning framework integrating Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Networks (CTGAN) for the early detection of IDA in pregnant women. Our approach addresses the class imbalance inherent in clinical datasets and incorporates trimester-specific hematological adaptations.  Using 3,944 anonymized clinical records from ASA Hospital Sarajevo (January–July 2025), we evaluated model performance across hematological features commonly used in obstetric care. The optimized model achieved a precision of 100%, recall of 65.2%, specificity of 100%, and an AUC-ROC of 0.8686. Comparative analysis against conventional CBC screening, which reached only 40.5% sensitivity, demonstrated significant improvement in detection reliability. These findings demonstrate the potential of AI-enhanced diagnostics to support early detection of IDA in pregnant women, reduce missed diagnoses, and strengthen clinical decision-making. Further multi-center validation and integration of additional biomarkers are recommended to confirm generalizability.

Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer in women, worldwide. Infection with humanpapillomavirus (HPV) has been accepted as the primary cause for the development of invasive cervicalcancer and its precursor lesions. Despite HPV infection has been proposed as an indispensable factor forcervical cancer development, only a subset of neoplastic lesions with HPV infection persist and progress toinvasive cancer. This suggests us that other molecular events are also involved in cancer progression. Aimof this study was to extract mRNA from cytobrush-collected healthy and HPV infected cervical epithelialcells and investigate various RNA extraction and purification protocols for assessment of RNA yield andquality. Taking into consideration that cervical cancer screening is based on the cytology basedPapanicolaou test (Pap test), main challenge is to investigate whether the samples obtained by regular Paptesting can be used for gene expression analysis. For this purpose, a total of 68 cervical specimens werepreviously tested for HPV infection. Following HPV testing, samples were submitted to RNA extractionand compared to the products after additional purification step involving DNase I. Products obtained afterdifferent RNA extraction and purification methods were visualized using 2% agarose gel electrophoresis.In conclusion, DNase I based RNA purification represents a necessary step for the assurance of a high-quality extracted RNA used for gene expression analysis studies. Reliance on commercial kits for RNAextraction only, without performing additional purification step can lead to errors in drawing finalconclusions and/or to false negative gene expression profiling, affecting the overall diagnostic procedure.According to obtained results, the type of sampling used in this study was not suitable for the subsequentgene expression analysis.

Background Serostudies are important resources when following pandemics and predicting their further spread, as well as determining the length of protection against reinfection and vaccine development. The aim of this study was to update data on the prevalence of seropositive individuals in Canton Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) from September 2020 to May 2021. Methods Anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies were quantified using an electrochemiluminescence immunoassay. Results Compared to the period April–July 2020, when anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies were detected in 3.77% of samples, one year later (May 2021) the estimated percentage within the same population of the urban Canton Sarajevo was 29.9% (5,406/18,066). Of all anti-SARS-CoV-2 Ig-positive individuals, 53.27% were men, and 69.00% were of 50 years of age or younger. Also, the current update found the individuals 50 years of age or younger to be more frequently anti-SARS-CoV-2 Ig positive compared to older individuals. On the other hand, higher median anti-SARS-CoV-2 Ig levels were found in individuals > 50 years old than in younger individuals, as well as in men compared to women. Seropositivity gradually increased from September 2020 to May 2021, with the lowest frequency of positive cases (3.5%) observed in September 2020, and the highest frequency (77.7%) in January 2021. Conclusion Our results provided important seroprevalence data that could help in planning restrictive local public health measures to protect the population of Sarajevo Canton, especially considering that at the time of the study the vaccines were virtually inaccessible to the general population not belonging to any of the high-priority groups for vaccination.

Introduction Serological detection of SARS-CoV-2-specific immunoglobulins G (IgG) and M (IgM) antibodies is becoming increasingly important in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We report the first results of COVID-19 serological testing in Bosnia and Herzegovina on 2841 samples collected and analysed in 2 medical institutions in Sarajevo. Antibody detection was performed using commercially available kits. Results In the first cohort, 43 IgM-positive/IgG-negative and 16 IgM-positive/IgG-positive individuals were detected, corresponding to 3.41% of participants having developed antibodies. In the second cohort, 4.28% participants were found to be IgM-negative/IgG-positive. Conclusions Our results suggest the need for population-wide serological surveying in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection is the most common infectious cause of birth defects. It maycause both, immediate and long term health problems in infants. These include variety of symptoms, suchas hearing loss, microcephaly, jaundice, hepatosplenomegaly and seizures. In more severe cases CMVinfection can cause the death of an unborn baby and loss of pregnancy. Despite being one of the mostextensively studied vertically transmitted infections recently, the adverse effects of vertically transmittedCMV infection are still not well presented to the general public, resulting in a low awareness amongpotential expectant mothers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This study aims to elucidate the sensitivity of urinesamples for CMV detection in infants as well as to reflect the importance of quantitative real-time PCR(qRT-PCR) in diagnostics of CMV infection in infants. qRT-PCR was used in this study as a technique forthe screening of CMV DNA in a cohort of patients based in Sarajevo Canton. These results have shownthat urine samples are sufficiently sensitive for the detection of CMV DNA in infants. Furthermore, thesimultaneous analysis of several patients has shown a higher number of CMV DNA copies amplified inurine compared to blood samples, derived from the same patient, thus proposing urine as a reliable sampleof choice for congenital CMV diagnostics. These findings may propose a need to classify qRT-PCR CMVtest among one of the recommended first-trimester pregnancy screening tests, which could help in earlydetection of CMV infection in Sarajevo Canton.

Cervical cancer represents a serious health problem affecting women worldwide especially in developing countries due to low socioeconomic status, inadequate health-care infrastructure, weaknesses in education on this particular issue and lack of effective screening programmes. The primary aim of this study was to assess alternative screening method for the improvement of cervical cancer prevention in conditions of Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), which could be applicable in other developing countries as well. The study was conducted on 101 subjects who provided their self-sampled vaginal swabs and/or cervical specimens collected by their gynecologists. Universal Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) primer set optimized to detect a wide range of HPV types was used for HPV genotyping from obtained swab samples in multiplex PCR. Amplicons were analyzed in agarose gel and Agilent 2100 bioanalyzer – a platform based on microfluid technology. Inter-rater agreement kappa (MedCalc2) was used to assess concordance between results of cervical and vaginal sample analysis. Out of 39 subjects who provided their vaginal and cervical samples, results of HPV detection mismatched in 10% of the cases. Inter-rater agreement showed good strength of coincidence between the results of cervical and vaginal sample analysis (kappa=0,748, CI=95 %). We presented an alternative PCR method for the detection of HPV based on vaginal self sampling which is affordable, informative, simple and applicable with high coverage level of defined targeted population and potentially significant in the given cultural and socioeconomic context.

Background: The serum prostate specific antigen for the early detection and screening for prostate cancer are very common used among physicians as the best screening tool for prostate cancer. The result of prostate specific antigen levels discriminates whether or not a prostate biopsy should be performed. The lack of specificity is a limitation of PSA as tumor marker, increased PSA concentrations are found not only in patients with prostate cancer but also in patients with benign prostatic disease. The object of this study was to improve the specificity and sensitivity of prostatic cancer detection. We evaluated total PSA levels, free PSA levels and the prostate volume in asymptomatic patients which came for routine check without medical history of prostate cancer. Methods: We received medical record of 90 patients between 50-60 years. Total and free PSA in serum was measured with the analyzer Architeckt i2000 SR. Prostate volume was determined by transrectal ultrasound. Results : The ratio of total and free PSA levels to prostate volume was significantly (p < 0.001) between all three groups. It was observed that increased prostate volume correlates with increased level of total and free PSA in serum. Conclusion: Early studies have demonstrated the advantage of measuring prostate volume with PSA total and free levels in serum as a useful tool for early diagnosis of prostate cancer. Data from this study on 90 patients with total PSA in the range from 0,22-7,0 ng/ml confirmed the well known correlation. All three parameters total PSA, free PSA and prostate volume showed significant correlation and a useful tool in prediction of prostate cancer for Bosnia and Herzegovina men.