Tuition, Financial Aid, Debt, and Dental Student Attrition

The 1993 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:93) was used to develop a model of dental student within-year persistence that examines the influence of three price and price subsidies (financial aid, tuition, and debt) variations on the probability of within-year persistence of dental students. Results indicate that the amount of financial aid received by dental students may be meeting their immediate financial needs as tuition is charged from one semester to the next. However, debt, a measure of longer-term and accumulative financial burden incurred beginning with undergraduate preparation, may have an intervening influence on the probability of within-year persistence. When considering both debt and tuition costs, the effect of financial aid is reduced considerably. While tuition increases do not appear to have a negative impact on current year persistence decisions, the significant negative coefficient for debt (p \u3c . OS) may indicate that there is a limit to the cumulative debt that a student is willing to assume. By assuming increasingly more debt, dental students are putting themselves at significant risk for dropping or stopping out

High-dose chemotherapy with stem cell rescue as initial therapy for anaplastic oligodendroglioma: Long-term follow-up

We previously reported a phase 2 trial of 69 patients with newly diagnosed anaplastic or aggressive oligodendroglioma who were treated with intensive procarbazine, CCNU (lomustine), and vincristine (PCV) followed by high-dose thiotepa with autologous stem cell rescue. This report summarizes the long-term follow-up of the cohort of 39 patients who received high-dose thiotepa with autologous stem cell support. Thirty-nine patients with a median age of 43 (range, 18–67) and a median KPS of 100 (range, 70–100) were treated. Surviving patients now have a median follow-up of 80.5 months (range, 44–142). The median progression-free survival is 78 months, and median overall survival has not been reached. Eighteen patients (46%) have relapsed. Neither histology nor prior low-grade oligodendroglioma correlated with risk of relapse. Persistent nonenhancing tumor at transplant was identified in our initial report as a significant risk factor for relapse; however, long-term follow-up has not confirmed this finding. Long-term neurotoxicity has developed only in those patients whose disease relapsed and required additional therapy; no patient in continuous remission has developed a delayed neurologic injury. This treatment strategy affords long-term disease control to a subset of patients with newly diagnosed anaplastic oligodendroglioma without evidence of delayed neurotoxicity or myelodysplasia