The Medical Necessity for Medicinal Cannabis: Prospective, Observational Study Evaluating the Treatment in Cancer Patients on Supportive or Palliative Care

Background. Cancer patients using cannabis report better influence from the plant extract than from synthetic products. However, almost all the research conducted to date has been performed with synthetic products. We followed patients with a medicinal cannabis license to evaluate the advantages and side effects of using cannabis by cancer patients. Methods. The study included two interviews based on questionnaires regarding symptoms and side effects, the first held on the day the license was issued and the second 6–8 weeks later. Cancer symptoms and cannabis side effects were documented on scales from 0 to 4 following the CTCAE. The distress thermometer was used also. Results. Of the 211 patients who had a first interview, only 131 had the second interview, 25 of whom stopped treatment after less than a week. All cancer or anticancer treatment-related symptoms showed significant improvement (P<0.001). No significant side effects except for memory lessening in patients with prolonged cannabis use (P=0.002) were noted. Conclusion. The positive effects of cannabis on various cancer-related symptoms are tempered by reliance on self-reporting for many of the variables. Although studies with a control group are missing, the improvement in symptoms should push the use of cannabis in palliative treatment of oncology patients

On the Structure and Application of BGP Policy Atoms

The notion of Internet Policy Atoms has been recently introduced in [1], [2] as groups of prefixes sharing a common BGP AS path at any Internet backbone router. In this paper we further research these &apos;Atoms&apos;. First we offer a new method for computing the Internet policy atoms, and use the RIPE RIS database [6] to derive their structure. Second, we show that atoms remain stable with only about 2-3% of prefixes changing their atom membership in eight hour periods. We support the &apos;Atomic&apos; nature of the policy atoms by showing BGP update and withdraw notifications carry updates for complete atoms in over 70% of updates, while the complete set of prefixes in an AS is carried in only 21% of updates. We track the locations where atoms are created (first different AS in the AS path going back from the common origin AS 1 ) showing 86% are split between the origin AS and it&apos;s peers thus supporting the assumption that they are created by policies. Finally applying atoms to &quot;real life&quot; applications we achieve a modest savings in BGP updates due to the low average prefix count in the atoms