DEPARTMENT OF MEDICINE & RESEARCH LAB OF INTERNAL MEDICINE
UNIVERSITY OF THESSALY
Director: Prof. G.N. Dalekos (CV)
The Department of Medicine and Research Laboratory of Internal Medicine of the University of Thessaly School of Medicine have been established in the University Hospital of Larissa in Greece since 1999. Under the leadership of Professor George N. Dalekos, it serves patients from Central Greece providing outstanding health care but also patients from all over the country who require a specific diagnosis and tertiary care, in particular for autoimmune liver diseases (autoimmune hepatitis and its variants and autoimmune cholestatic liver diseases), viral hepatitis B, C and delta, uncommon infections, fever of unknown origin and other autoimmune or autoinflammatory diseases and syndromes including familial Mediterranean fever.
A Medical Intermediate Care Unit for Critically Ill Patients with 4 beds is located into the ward for the management of patients with complex medical critical care problems like stroke, intracranial hemorrhage, respiratory failure, pneumonia, shock, massive pulmonary embolism, congestive heart failure, acute renal failure, severe pancreatitis, liver failure, diabetic ketoacidosis and life-threatening infections.
An Infectious Diseases Unit is also located in the Department. The Unit offers a wide range of inpatient and outpatient clinical services related to the care of patients with infectious diseases.
The Department runs six outpatient clinics: the Internal Medicine Outpatient Clinic, the Hepatology Outpatient Clinic, the Transient Elastography Liver Unit, the Hypertension Outpatient Clinic, the ALKO Outpatient Clinic (in close cooperation with the Psychiatric Clinic for patients addicted to alcohol) and the Stroke and Vascular Diseases Outpatient Clinic.
The affiliated Research Laboratory of Internal Medicine was also founded in 1999 by the University of Thessaly. Various diagnostic tests of autoantibodies associated with autoimmune liver diseases or induced by hepatitis viruses are available using multiple sophisticated techniques that are established in our laboratory (in-house methods like indirect immunofluorescence on fresh rat liver-kidney-stomach cryostat sections, western blotting on cytosolic, mitochondrial and microsomal extracts, etc.) according to the 2004 guidelines of the liver autoimmune serology subcommittee. These tests are not performed anywhere in Greece in a similarly standardized way. The Laboratory has been acknowledged as a reference center for the diagnostic approach of autoantibodies detection in autoimmune liver diseases and therefore, a considerable number of sera of undiagnosed patients from major tertiary hospitals of the country but also from private hospitals / health institutions and private practitioners are investigated annually. As a result, the Department of Medicine and Research Laboratory of Internal Medicine has been recorded by the Hellenic Center for Disease Control & Prevention as a Special Rare Diseases Center for Autoimmune Hepatitis. In addition, detection and quantification of the viral load of hepatitis B, C and delta viruses is performed in the Laboratory with modern standardized molecular techniques (HCV-RNA, HBV-DNA with real-time PCR technique, HCV genotyping and quantification of HDV-RNA). Several studies are performed in the Laboratory focusing on various scientific fields either in biological specimens of patients like the immunopathogenesis of autoimmune hepatitis, primary biliary cirrhosis and chronic viral hepatitis B, C and delta, or in animal models such as the ApoE knockout mice, in order to study the effect of various substances on plasma lipids and on the development of atherosclerosis.
The Department is responsible for three core modules: Clinical Examination and Diagnosis in Internal Medicine (module code ΠΘ02000), Internal Medicine I (IM: 0301) and Internal Medicine: Clinical Clerkship (IM 0100). The curriculum of each module can be found in the following links:
