Current medical treatment of estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer

Approximately 80% of breast cancers (BC) are estrogen receptor (ER)-positive and thus endocrine therapy (ET) should be considered complementary to surgery in the majority of patients. The advantages of oophorectomy, adrenalectomy and hypophysectomy in women with advanced BC have been demonstrated many years ago, and currently ET consist of (i) ovarian function suppression (OFS), usually obtained using gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists (GnRHa), (ii) selective estrogen receptor modulators or down-regulators (SERMs or SERDs), (iii) aromatase inhibitors (AIs), or a combination of two or more drugs. For patients aged less than 50 years and ER+ BC, there is no conclusive evidence that the combination of OFS and SERMs (i.e. tamoxifen) or chemotherapy is superior to OFS alone. Tamoxifen users exhibit a reduced risk of BC, both invasive and in situ, especially during the first 5 years of therapy, and extending the treatment to 10 years further reduced the risk of recurrences. SERDs (i.e. fulvestrant) are especially useful in the neoadjuvant treatment of advanced BC, alone or in combination with either cytotoxic agents or AIs. There are two types of AIs: type I are permanent steroidal inhibitors of aromatase, while type II are reversible nonsteroidal inhibitors. Several studies demonstrated the superiority of the third-generation AIs (i.e. anastrozole and letrozole) compared with tamoxifen, and adjuvant therapy with AIs reduces the recurrence risk especially in patients with advanced BC. Unfortunately, some cancers are or became ET-resistant, and thus other drugs have been suggested in combination with SERMs or AIs, including cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 inhibitors (palbociclib) and mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) inhibitors, such as everolimus. Further studies are required to confirm their real usefulness

Tree Level Unitarity Bounds for the Minimal B-L Model

We have derived the unitarity bounds in the high energy limit for the minimal B-L extension of the Standard Model by analysing the full class of Higgs and would-be Goldstone boson two-to-two scatterings at tree level. Moreover, we have investigated how these limits could vary at some lower critical value of the energy.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables; 1d figure modified, typos corrected, bibliography augmented; published in PRD after minor adjustmen

The Z' boson of the minimal B-L model at future Linear Colliders in e+e- --> mu+mu-

We study the capabilities of future electron-positron Linear Colliders, with centre-of-mass energy at the TeV scale, in accessing the parameter space of a $Z'$ boson within the minimal $B-L$ model. We carry out a detailed comparison between the discovery regions mapped over a two-dimensional configuration space ($Z'$ mass and coupling) at the Large Hadron Collider and possible future Linear Colliders for the case of di-muon production. As known in the literature for other $Z'$ models, we confirm that leptonic machines, as compared to the CERN hadronic accelerator, display an additional potential in discovering a $Z'$ boson as well as in allowing one to study its properties at a level of precision well beyond that of any of the existing colliders.Comment: 5 pages, proceeding of LC09 (Perugia), published by the Italian Physical Society in the Nuovo Cimento C (Colloquia

Photon and Pomeron -- induced production of Dijets in pppp, pApA and AAAA collisions

In this paper we present a detailed comparison of the dijet production by photon -- photon, photon -- pomeron and pomeron -- pomeron interactions in $pp$, $pA$ and ${\rm AA}$ collisions at the LHC energy. The transverse momentum, pseudo -- rapidity and angular dependencies of the cross sections are calculated at LHC energy using the Forward Physics Monte Carlo (FPMC), which allows to obtain realistic predictions for the dijet production with two leading intact hadrons. We obtain that \gamma \pom channel is dominant at forward rapidities in $pp$ collisions and in the full kinematical range in the nuclear collisions of heavy nuclei. Our results indicate that the analysis of dijet production at the LHC can be useful to test the Resolved Pomeron model as well as to constrain the magnitude of the absorption effects.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. Improved and enlarged version published in European Physical Journal

Phenomenology of the minimal B-L extension of the Standard Model

We present the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) discovery potential in the $Z'$ and heavy neutrino sectors of a $U(1)_{B-L}$ enlarged Standard Model also encompassing three heavy Majorana neutrinos. This model exhibits novel signatures at the LHC, the most interesting arising from a $Z'$ decay chain involving heavy neutrinos, eventually decaying into leptons and jets. In particular, this signature allows one to measure the $Z'$ and heavy neutrino masses involved. In addition, over a large region of parameter space, the heavy neutrinos are rather long-lived particles producing distinctive displaced vertices that can be seen in the detectors. Lastly, the simultaneous measurement of both the heavy neutrino mass and decay length enables an estimate of the absolute mass of the parent light neutrino. For completeness, we will also compare the LHC and a future Linear Collider (LC) discovery potentials.Comment: 4 pages, no figures. LaTeX. Talk given at "The 2009 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics", Krakow, Poland, July 16-22, 200

Heuristics for a green orienteering problem

We address a routing problem where a vehicle with limited time, loading capacity and battery autonomy can optionally serve a set of customers, each providing a profit. Such a problem is of particular relevance both because of its practical implications in sustainable transportation and its use as a sub-problem in Green Vehicle Routing column generation algorithms. We propose a dynamic programming approach to obtain both primal and dual bounds to the value of the optimal solutions, a fast greedy heuristics and a very large scale neighbourhood search procedure

Active shape correction of a thin glass/plastic X-ray mirror

Optics for future X-ray telescopes will be characterized by very large aperture and focal length, and will be made of lightweight materials like glass or plastic in order to keep the total mass within acceptable limits. Optics based on thin slumped glass foils are currently in use in the NuSTAR telescope and are being developed at various institutes like INAF/OAB, aiming at improving the angular resolution to a few arcsec HEW. Another possibility would be the use of thin plastic foils, being developed at SAO and the Palermo University. Even if relevant progresses in the achieved angular resolution were recently made, a viable possibility to further improve the mirror figure would be the application of piezoelectric actuators onto the non-optical side of the mirrors. In fact, thin mirrors are prone to deform, so they require a careful integration to avoid deformations and even correct forming errors. This however offers the possibility to actively correct the residual deformation. Even if other groups are already at work on this idea, we are pursuing the concept of active integration of thin glass or plastic foils with piezoelectric patches, fed by voltages driven by the feedback provided by X-rays, in intra-focal setup at the XACT facility at INAF/OAPA. In this work, we show the preliminary simulations and the first steps taken in this project

Natural Z′Z' model with an inverse seesaw and leptonic dark matter

We consider a model for a Z'-boson coupled only to baryon minus lepton number and hypercharge. Besides the usual right-handed neutrinos, we add a pair of fermions with a fractional lepton charge, which we therefore call leptinos. One of the leptinos is taken to be odd under an additional Z_2 charge, the other even. This allows for a natural (inverse) seesaw mechanism for neutrino masses. The odd leptino is a candidate for dark matter, but has to be resonantly annihilated by the Z'-boson or the Higgs-boson responsible for giving mass to the former. Considering collider and cosmological bounds on the model, we find that the Z'-boson and/or the extra Higgs-boson can be seen at the LHC. With more pairs of leptinos leptogenesis is possible.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures. RGE section moved to appendix and other minor corrections applied to matched published versio

Instability of the expression of morphological and phenological descriptors to environmental variation in white oat.

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Health-related quality of life in AYA cancer survivors who underwent HSCT compared with healthy peers

This\ue002study\ue002was\ue002aimed\ue002at\ue002comparing\ue002adolescent\ue002and\ue002young\ue002adult\ue002(AYA)\ue002Hematopoietic\ue002 Stem Cell Transplantation (HSCT) paediatric cancer survivors and a control group of healthy peers in terms of Health- Related Quality of Life (HRQOL) and frequency of posttraumatic\ue002stress\ue002symptoms\ue002(PTSS).\ue002The\ue002participants\ue002were\ue00232\ue002AYA\ue002HSCT\ue002survi- vors and 28 matched healthy peers. The survivors were, on average, 19.4 years old (SD = 3.8), with an average age of 8.1 years (SD = 4.3) at diagnosis, and with a mean time, since treatment was completed, of 8.5 years (SD = 3.2). The majority of survi- vors (78.1%) did not show clinical PTSS, with intrusion symptoms most frequently reported in those who had undergone autologous HSCT (F = 3.3; df = 2; p = 0.05) and relapse presence in their treatment associated with more PTSS avoidance symptoms (r = 0.4; p\ue002=\ue0020.002).\ue002Women\ue002reported\ue002more\ue002problems\ue002in\ue002the\ue002SF-\ue00236\ue002pain\ue002scale\ue002(t = 2.1; df = 31; p\ue002=\ue0020.04)\ue002than\ue002men.\ue002Additionally,\ue00287.5%\ue002of\ue002survivors\ue002fell\ue002below\ue002the\ue00225th\ue002per- centile\ue002in\ue002the\ue002SF-\ue00236\ue002general\ue002well-\ue002being\ue002scale,\ue002and\ue00270.8%\ue002had\ue002the\ue002same\ue002trend\ue002for\ue002the\ue002 SF-\ue00236\ue002fatigue\ue002scale.\ue002Survivors\ue002reported\ue002better\ue002emotional\ue002well-\ue002being\ue002(t\ue002=\ue0022.6,\ue002df = 27, p = 0.01) and fewer limitations than their healthy peers (t = 2.5, df = 27, p = 0.02), while they perceived a lower life satisfaction referring to the past (t\ue002=\ue002 122.8,\ue002df = 27, p = 0.009)