The Relation between Birth Weight and Insulin Resistance in Korean Adolescents

Low birth weight is associated with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes in adults. The fetal programming hypothesis has shown that insulin resistance and its associated metabolic disturbances result from a poor gestational environment, for which low birth weight is a surrogate. An at-home questionnaire survey was performed on 660 middle school students (12-15 years) in Seoul, Korea, and 152 cases were randomly selected based on their birth weight. Subjects were divided into three groups according to birth weight. We recorded their birth weight and measured their current anthropometric data, blood pressure, lipid profile, HOMA-IR, and HOMA-β, and compared these parameters among the groups. The relation of birth weight to physiological characteristics in adolescence was examined. Systolic blood pressure, lipid profiles, and fasting plasma glucose, HOMA-β were not significantly different among the groups, but diastolic blood pressure was lower in the third tertile. Insulin, C-peptide, and HOMA-IR were higher in the lower birth weight tertile. After adjustment for confounding factors, birth weight was inversely related to diastolic blood pressure, insulin, C-peptide, and HOMA-IR. We conclude that low birth weight may predict the risk of the insulin resistance and its progression over age, and that adequate gestational nutrition is therefore necessary to prevent low birth weight

Helical tomotherapy with concurrent capecitabine for the treatment of inoperable pancreatic cancer

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Helical tomotherapy, an advanced intensity-modulated radiation therapy with integrated CT imaging, permits highly conformal irradiation with sparing of normal tissue. Capecitabine, a pro-drug of 5-FU that induces thymidine phosphorylase can achieve higher levels of intracellular 5-FU when administered concurrently with radiation. We evaluated the feasibility as well as the clinical outcome of concurrent administration of capecitabine with tomotherapy in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Nineteen patients with advanced pancreatic cancer including primarily unresectable disease and recurrence after curative surgery were included in the study. Two planning target volumes (PTV) were entered: PTV1 is gross tumor volume; and PTV2, the volume of the draining lymph nodes. The total doses to target 1 and target 2 were 55 and 50 Gy, respectively. Capecitabine at 1600 mg/m²/day was administered on each day of irradiation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Twenty six measurable lesions were evaluated. Overall in-field response rate was 42.3%; partial responses were achieved in 53.3% of the pancreatic masses, 28.6% of distant metastatic lesions and 25.0% of regional lymph nodes. The median duration of follow-up after tomotherapy was 6.5 months. None of the lesions showed in-field progression. Treatment was well tolerated with only minor toxicities such as grade 1 nausea (one patient), grade 1 hand-foot syndrome (one patient) and grade 1/2 fatigue (three patients).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Helical tomotherapy with concurrent capecitabine is a feasible option without significant toxicities in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. We achieved excellent conformal distribution of radiation doses and minimal treatment-related toxicities with promising target volume responses.</p

Interval debulking surgery with or without hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy in advanced-stage ovarian cancer: Single-institution cohort study

To evaluate the additive effects of hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) to interval debulking surgery (IDS) in patients with advanced-stage ovarian cancer. From January 2015 to February 2019, 123 patients with stages IIIC-IV ovarian cancer were treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) followed by IDS with optimal cytoreduction. Forty-three patients received IDS with HIPEC and 80 patients had IDS without HIPEC. The median follow-up period was 34.4 months. No differences in baseline characteristics in patients were found between the two groups. The IDS with HIPEC group had fewer median cycles of chemotherapy (P = 0.002) than the IDS group. The IDS with HIPEC group had a higher rate of high surgical complexity score (P = 0.032) and higher rate of complete resection (P = 0.041) compared to the IDS group. The times to start adjuvant chemotherapy were longer in the IDS with HIPEC group compared to the IDS group (P &lt; 0.001). Postoperative grade 3 or 4 complications were similar in the two groups (P = 0.237). Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that HIPEC with the IDS group had better progression-free survival (PFS) (P = 0.010), while there was no difference in overall survival between the two groups (P = 0.142). In the multivariate analysis, HIPEC was significantly associated with better PFS (HR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.39 - 0.93). The addition of HIPEC to IDS resulted in longer PFS than IDS without HIPEC not affecting the safety profile. Further research is needed to evaluate the true place of HIPEC in the era of targeted treatments