All laboratory procedures will be carried out respecting safety regulations and bench investigators will be blinded to the patients' group of origin and to their clinical data. To accomplish this blindness, before starting the bench phase all vials will be re-labelled with a new code and only the project coordinators will be aware of the new code. Statistics and sample size Data will be tested for normality and then analyzed with parametric or non-parametric procedures, as appropriate. Accordingly, univariate analysis using Student and analysis of variance or Mann-Whitney, Wilcoxon, Kruskal-Wallis and Friedman tests will be performed. Some laboratory data will be subjected to correlation analysis with clinical findings, using Pearson's, Spearman's or Kendall's technique, according to data characteristics.