Health-Related Quality of Life and Needs of Care and Support of Adult Tanzanians with Cancer: A Mixed-Methods Study.

Cancer is among the three leading causes of death in low income countries and the highest increase with regard to incidence figures for cancer diseases are found in these countries. This is the first report of the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and needs of care and support of adult Tanzanians with cancer. A mixed-methods design was used. The study was conducted at Ocean Road Cancer Institute (ORCI) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. One hundred and one patients with a variety of cancer diagnoses treated and cared for at ORCI answered the Kiswahili version of the EORTC QLQ-C30 investigating HRQOL. Thirty-two of the patients participated in focus group interviews discussing needs of care and support. Data from focus group interviews were analyzed with content analysis. The findings show that the patients, both women and men, report a low quality of life, especially with regard to physical, role, and social function and a high level of symptoms and problems especially with financial difficulties and pain. Financial difficulties are reported to a remarkably high extent by both women and men. The patients, both women and men report least problems with emotional function. A content analysis of the interview data revealed needs of food and water, hygienic needs, emotional needs, spiritual needs, financial needs, and needs of closeness to cancer care and treatment services. The high score for pain points out that ORCI is facing severe challenges regarding care and treatment. However, when considering this finding it should be noted that the pain subscale of the Kiswahili version of the EORTC QLQ-C30 did not reach acceptable internal consistency and showed less than satisfactory convergent validity. This also applies to the subscales cognitive function and global health/quality of life. Attention should be drawn to meet the identified needs of Tanzanian cancer patients while hospitalized but also when at home. Increased accessibility of mosquito nets, pads, and pain-killers would help to fulfil some needs

Symmetric Jacobians

This article is about polynomial maps with a certain symmetry and/or antisymmetry in their Jacobians, and whether the Jacobian Conjecture is satisfied for such maps, or whether it is sufficient to prove the Jacobian Conjecture for such maps. For instance, we show that it suffices to prove the Jacobian conjecture for polynomial maps x + H over C such that JH satisfies all symmetries of the square, where H is homogeneous of arbitrary degree d >= 3.Comment: 18 pages, minor corrections, grayscale eepic boxes have been replaced by colorful tikz boxe

Kepler-210: An active star with at least two planets

We report the detection and characterization of two short-period, Neptune-sized planets around the active host star Kepler-210. The host star's parameters derived from those planets are (a) mutually inconsistent and (b) do not conform to the expected host star parameters. We furthermore report the detection of transit timing variations (TTVs) in the O-C diagrams for both planets. We explore various scenarios that explain and resolve those discrepancies. A simple scenario consistent with all data appears to be one that attributes substantial eccentricities to the inner short-period planets and that interprets the TTVs as due to the action of another, somewhat longer period planet. To substantiate our suggestions, we present the results of N-body simulations that modeled the TTVs and that checked the stability of the Kepler-210 system.Comment: 8 pages, 8 Encapsulated Postscript figure

Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy with 177Lu-octreotate: clinical aspects

Somatostatin is a neuropeptide with a variety of functions and is produced in several tissues. The isoform somatostatin-14 (SS-14) is more biologically active than SS-28. Its main physiological function is to inhibit secretion of hormones such as growth hormone or thyroid stimulating hormone in the pituitary, insulin or glucagon in the pancreas and of exocrine gut secretion. The effects of somatostatin are mediated by binding to the somatostatin receptor (sst), which are G-protein-coupled receptors. Five sst subtypes have been identified (sst1 - sst5) which all have different roles. The naturally occurring SS-14 and SS-28 have high affinity for all these subtypes. Several tumours (Table 1), amongst others gastroenteropancreatic tumours (GEPNET), have overexpression of sst on the cell surface. This makes sst a possible target for therapy with somatostatin analogues to try and inhibit the secretion of bioactive substances by these tumours and possibly to slow down tumour growth. However, the biological half-life of SS-14 and SS-28 is short, and this makes it impossible to use them for therapeutic goals. With the invention of the cyclic octapeptide octreotide, half-life increased significantly and octreotide then could be used in treatment of patients with sst-positive tumours

Stereotyping: An Open Conversation on the Establishment, Nature, and Impact of Stereotypes on Society

Stereotypes are generalizations about groups of people that have impacted predominantly marginalized communities. We typically use stereotypes against a generalized other and some stereotypes have become part of our perceptual sets. This activity attempts to re-humanize stereotypes by confronting students with known stereotypes and makes students reflect on the impact of stereotypes on people’s lives

Remarks on a normal subgroup of GA_n

We show that the subgroup generated by locally finite polynomial automorphisms of k^n is normal in GA_n. Also, some properties of normal subgroups of GA_n containing all diagonal automorphisms are given.Comment: 5 page