Mitoxantrone is superior to doxorubicin in a multiagent weekly regimen for patients older than 60 with high-grade lymphoma: results of a BNLI randomized trial of PAdriaCEBO versus PMitCEBO

A prospective, multicenter, randomized trial was undertaken to compare the efficacy and toxicity of adriamycin with mitoxantrone within a 6-drug combination chemotherapy regimen for elderly patients (older than 60 years) with high-grade non-Hodgkin lymphoma (HGL) given for a minimum of 8 weeks. A total of 516 previously untreated patients aged older than 60 years were randomized to receive 1 of 2 anthracycline-containing regimens: adriamycin, 35 mg/m2 intravenously (IV) on day 1 (n = 259), or mitoxantrone, 7 mg/m2 IV on day 1 (n = 257); with prednisolone, 50 mg orally on days 1 to 14; cyclophosphamide, 300 mg/m2 IV on day 1; etoposide, 150 mg/m2 IV on day 1; vincristine, 1.4 mg/m2 IV on day 8; and bleomycin, 10 mg/m2 IV on day 8. Each 2-week cycle was administered for a minimum of 8 weeks in the absence of progression. Forty-three patients were ineligible for analysis. The overall and complete remission rates were 78% and 60% for patients receiving PMitCEBO and 69% and 52% for patients receiving PAdriaCEBO (P = .05, P = .12, respectively). Overall survival was significantly better with PMitCEBO than PAdriaCEBO (P = .0067). However, relapse-free survival was not significantly different (P = .16). At 4 years, 28% of PAdriaCEBO patients and 50% of PMitCEBO patients were alive (P = .0001). Ann Arbor stage III/IV, World Health Organization performance status 2-4, and elevated lactate dehydrogenase negatively influenced overall survival from diagnosis. In conclusion, the PMitCEBO 8-week combination chemotherapy regimen offers high response rates, durable remissions, and acceptable toxicity in elderly patients with HGL

The Impact of Weather on the Behavior and Ecology of Birds

Weather conditions affect animals in many different ways. Variation in temperature, rainfall, wind, and other environmental variables can have an impact at a range of temporal and spatial scales and at every level from individual behavior to species distributions. The interactions between these variables may be particularly important but are often overlooked. Hence, understanding how animals respond to weather conditions is a fundamental topic in evolution, ecology, and conservation, especially in a time of major environmental change.Birds are an ideal group in which to investigate these relationships because they occur in almost every ecosystem across the globe, exploit a wide variety of food resources and often move between vastly different environments during their annual life cycle. Most recent research has focused on the impact of climate change and extreme weather events, but even small-scale variation in weather conditions may influence avian behavior, life history, physiology, and morphology. Assessing how birds respond to variation in weather, and the fitness consequences this brings, therefore plays a crucial role in a number of active research areas, including:(1) identifying the selective pressures that may have led to trait evolution;(2) predicting how birds will respond to environmental change; and(3) developing successful conservation measures for threatened species.This timely Research Topic builds on the symposium The Effects of Weather on Birds held at the 2019 European Ornithologists’ Union Congress at Cluj-Napoca, Romania. It will bring together articles from a range of disciplines to offer valuable and synthesized insights into the relationship between weather and birds. In doing so, it will link together broader themes such as adaptation, phenotypic plasticity, life history evolution, population dynamics, and migration, while also increasing our knowledge on the potential impacts of climate change.We welcome contributions on any aspect of the weather and how it affects the behavior or ecology of birds. Articles may be original research papers, comparative analyses, reviews or perspectives

Analyzing Ideological Communities in Congressional Voting Networks

We here study the behavior of political party members aiming at identifying how ideological communities are created and evolve over time in diverse (fragmented and non-fragmented) party systems. Using public voting data of both Brazil and the US, we propose a methodology to identify and characterize ideological communities, their member polarization, and how such communities evolve over time, covering a 15-year period. Our results reveal very distinct patterns across the two case studies, in terms of both structural and dynamic properties

Party system closure and openness: conceptualization, operationalization and validation

The degree of closure of the governmental arena is a central aspect of the stabilization of party systems, and yet little systematic effort has been devoted to its operationalization. The article proposes a new index, examines its reliability and validity, and reports the ranking of 60 party systems. By redefining the units of measurement we suggest new indicators that are uniform and transparent in their logic of construction, can be applied both to specific government-changes and to time periods, and are sensitive to the degree of change. The article finds a hierarchy among the components of party system closure, dominated by coalition formula. While new and established democracies can both produced closed patterns, the analysis of inter-war European party systems shows that closed systems are less prone to authoritarian takeover. The article demonstrates the power of inertia: the completely closed configurations stand out as the most durable ones