Prognostic Value of Metastatic Lymph Node Ratio in Pancreatic Cancer

WOS: 000461306700008PubMed ID: 30948872Lymph node involvement in pancreatic adenocancer is one of the strongest predictors of prognosis. However, the extent of lymph node dissection is still a matter of debate and number of dissected nodes varies widely among patients. In order to homogenize this diverse group of patients and more accurately predict their prognosis, we aimed to analyze the effect of metastatic lymph node ratio as an independent prognostic factor. We retrospectively analyzed medical recordings of 326 patients with pancreatic cancer who were treated in a tertiary medical oncology center over a 10-year period. Both in univariate and multivariate analyses, metastatic lymph node ratio proved to be a strong predictor of prognosis which was unaffected from heterogeneity of our patient population and can be used to facilitate predict prognosis of patients who underwent lymph node dissection to various extents and with future studies it can emerge as a successful tool for creating prognostic subgroups of the disease

Introduction: Intensionality and Emotive Expressions

The connections between intensionality and emotive content as expressed in natural language will be traced to determine how patterns in the relation between intensionality and emotive expressions reveal something about the way emotion as an independent component of the human mind interacts with the cognitive domain of language. Intensionality cannot be characterized without the notion of intentionality in that intensionality has something to do with non-specificity or opacity, and this opacity has partly to do with the underdetermination or underspecification of aboutness or directedness toward objects or entities, which characterizes the essence of intentionality. Such non-specificity or opacity has parallels in both language and structures of emotive content in the sense that intensional elements in quantificational contexts show a systematic semantic variability in the way non-specificity or opacity is expressed, and contents of (emotional) affect reveal similar patterns. Another reason why two distinct but otherwise related phenomena—intensionality and intentionality—are co-defined in association with each other is that intentionality appears to be a much more primitive form of biological feature (and maybe it was also present in earlier life-forms) from which language—especially linguistic meaning—has evolved (Searle 1983). And intensionality constitutes a significant and, at the same time, baffling aspect of linguistic meaning