Cosmological perturbations in modified teleparallel gravity models: Boundary term extension

Teleparallel gravity offers a new avenue in which to construct gravitational models beyond general relativity. While teleparallel gravity can be framed in a way to be dynamically equivalent to general relativity, its modifications are mostly not equivalent to the traditional route to modified gravity. $f(T,B)$ gravity is one such gravitational theory where the second and fourth order contributions to the field equations are decoupled. In this work, we explore the all important cosmological perturbations of this new framework of gravity. We derive the gravitational propagation equation, its vector perturbation stability conditions, and its scalar perturbations. Together with the matter perturbations, we derive the effective gravitational constant in this framework, and find an interesting branching behaviour that depends on the particular gravitational models being probed. We close with a discussion on the relation of these results with other gravitational theories.Comment: 21 page

Impact of perioperative chemotherapy on survival in patients with advanced primary urethral cancer: results of the international collaboration on primary urethral carcinoma

This is the first series that suggests a prognostic benefit of neoadjuvant treatment in a consecutive series of patients who underwent perioperative chemotherapy plus surgery for advanced primary urethral carcinoma. Further studies should yield a better understanding of how perioperative chemotherapy exerts a positive effect on survival in order to selectively advocate its use in advanced primary urethral carcinom

Risk Prediction Scores for Recurrence and Progression of Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer: An International Validation in Primary Tumours

Abstract Objective: We aimed to determine the validity of two risk scores for patients with non-muscle invasive bladder cancer in different European settings, in patients with primary tumours. Methods: We included 1,892 patients with primary stage Ta or T1 non-muscle invasive bladder cancer who underwent a transurethral resection in Spain (n = 973), the Netherlands (n = 639), or Denmark (n = 280). We evaluated recurrence-free survival and progression-free survival according to the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) and the Spanish Urological Club for Oncological Treatment (CUETO) risk scores for each patient and used the concordance index (c-index) to indicate discriminative ability. Results: The 3 cohorts were comparable according to age and sex, but patients from Denmark had a larger proportion of patients with the high stage and grade at diagnosis (p,0.01). At least one recurrence occurred in 839 (44%) patients and 258 (14%) patients had a progression during a median follow-up of 74 months. Patients from Denmark had the highest 10- year recurrence and progression rates (75% and 24%, respectively), whereas patients from Spain had the lowest rates (34% and 10%, respectively). The EORTC and CUETO risk scores both predicted progression better than recurrence with c-indices ranging from 0.72 to 0.82 while for recurrence, those ranged from 0.55 to 0.61. Conclusion: The EORTC and CUETO risk scores can reasonably predict progression, while prediction of recurrence is more difficult. New prognostic markers are needed to better predict recurrence of tumours in primary non-muscle invasive bladder cancer patients.This research received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework program FP7/2007-2011 under grant agreement 201663 (Uromol project, http://www.uromol.eu/

Clinicopathologic features of incidental prostatic adenocarcinoma in radical cystoprostatectomy specimens

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The aim of this study is to review all features of incidentally discovered prostate adenocarcinoma in patients undergoing radical cystoprostatectomy for bladder cancer.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The medical charts of 300 male patients who underwent radical cystoprostatectomy for bladder cancer between 1997 and 2005 were retrospectively reviewed. The mean age of the patients was 62 (range 51-75) years.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Prostate adenocarcinoma was present in 60 (20%) of 300 specimens. All were acinar adenocarcinoma. Of these, 40 (66.7%) were located in peripheral zone, 20 (33.3%) had pT2a tumor, 12 (20%) had pT2b tumor, 22(36.7%) had pT2c and, 6 (10%) had pT3a tumor. Gleason score was 6 or less in 48 (80%) patients. Surgical margins were negative in 54 (90%) patients, and tumor volume was less than 0.5 cc in 23 (38.3%) patients. Of the 60 incidentally detected cases of prostate adenocarcinoma 40 (66.7%) were considered clinically significant.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Incidentally detected prostate adenocarcinoma is frequently observed in radical cystoprostatectomy specimens. The majority are clinically significant.</p

GreekLex 2: a comprehensive lexical database with part-of-speech, syllabic, phonological, and stress information

Databases containing lexical properties on any given orthography are crucial for psycholinguistic research. In the last ten years, a number of lexical databases have been developed for Greek. However, these lack important part-of-speech information. Furthermore, the need for alternative procedures for calculating syllabic measurements and stress information, as well as combination of several metrics to investigate linguistic properties of the Greek language are highlighted. To address these issues, we present a new extensive lexical database of Modern Greek (GreekLex 2) with part-of-speech information for each word and accurate syllabification and orthographic information predictive of stress, as well as several measurements of word similarity and phonetic information. The addition of detailed statistical information about Greek part-of-speech, syllabification, and stress neighbourhood allowed novel analyses of stress distribution within different grammatical categories and syllabic lengths to be carried out. Results showed that the statistical preponderance of stress position on the pre-final syllable that is reported for Greek language is dependent upon grammatical category. Additionally, analyses showed that a proportion higher than 90% of the tokens in the database would be stressed correctly solely by relying on stress neighbourhood information. The database and the scripts for orthographic and phonological syllabification as well as phonetic transcription are available at http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/greeklex/

Predictive biomarkers for survival benefit with ramucirumab in urothelial cancer in the RANGE trial

The RANGE study (NCT02426125) evaluated ramucirumab (an anti-VEGFR2 monoclonal antibody) in patients with platinum-refractory advanced urothelial carcinoma (UC). Here, we use programmed cell death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) immunohistochemistry (IHC) and transcriptome analysis to evaluate the association of immune and angiogenesis pathways, and molecular subtypes, with overall survival (OS) in UC. Higher PD-L1 IHC and immune pathway scores, but not angiogenesis scores, are associated with greater ramucirumab OS benefit. Additionally, Basal subtypes, which have higher PD-L1 IHC and immune/angiogenesis pathway scores, show greater ramucirumab OS benefit compared to Luminal subtypes, which have relatively lower scores. Multivariable analysis suggests patients from East Asia as having lower immune/angiogenesis signature scores, which correlates with decreased ramucirumab OS benefit. Our data highlight the utility of multiple biomarkers including PD-L1, molecular subtype, and immune phenotype in identifying patients with UC who might derive the greatest benefit from treatment with ramucirumab