Re: Elevated Peripheral Blood Eosinophils during Acute Exacerbation of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Prevalence and clinical significance

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Spontaneous regression of FDG/PET positive lung adenocarcinoma in an elderly man

  Spontaneous cancer regression, either partial or complete, is a rare phenomenon, particularly in patients with lung cancer. The present paper is the case report of an elderly lung cancer patient aged 80 who exhibited spontaneous regression of the primary lesion, without receiving any treatment. Spontaneous regression commenced two years after obtaining pathological specimens by transbronchial biopsy from the pulmonary lesion. It is interesting that the tumor lesion had a strong uptake (standardized uptake value max: 26.3) in 18fluorodeoxyglucose positron-emission tomography before biopsy and that the regression occurred after a long interval after the biopsy, and that the regression developed in an elderly man. It is unknown why spontaneous regression was observed in this case and what kind of mechanism was involved in the phenomenon. Even in the elderly, as observed in our case, spontaneous regression can occur. The patient should be closely followed up to monitor the clinical course of such an unusual phenomenon.

Characteristics of Highly Polymorphic Segmental Copy-Number Variations Observed in Japanese by BAC-Array-CGH

Segmental copy-number variations (CNVs) may contribute to genetic variation in humans. Reports of the existence and characteristics of CNVs in a large Japanese cohort are quite limited. We report the data from a large Japanese population. We conducted population screening for 213 unrelated Japanese individuals using comparative genomic hybridization based on a bacterial artificial chromosome microarray (BAC-aCGH). We summarize the data by focusing on highly polymorphic CNVs in ≥5.0% of the individual, since they may be informative for demonstrating the relationships between genotypes and their phenotypes. We found a total of 680 CNVs at 16 different BAC-regions in the genome. The majority of the polymorphic CNVs presented on BAC-clones that overlapped with regions of segmental duplication, and the majority of the polymorphic CNVs observed in this population had been previously reported in other publications. Some of the CNVs contained genes which might be related to phenotypic heterogeneity among individuals