Menopause and colorectal cancer

Post-menopausal women who have never used hormone replacement therapy have a higher risk of colon, but not rectal, cancer than do premenopausal women of the same age, socio-cultural class and dietary habits. Such risk increase seems to last about 10 years and to be restricted to lean women, a group who have lower levels of oestradiol after ovarian function ceases after menopause. © 2000 Cancer Research Campaig

Medical image colorization for better visualization and segmentation

Medical images contain precious anatomical information for clinical procedures. Improved understanding of medical modality may contribute significantly in arena of medical image analysis. This paper investigates enhancement of monochromatic medical modality into colorized images. Improving the contrast of anatomical structures facilitates precise segmentation. The proposed framework starts with pre-processing to remove noise and improve edge information. Then colour information is embedded to each pixel of a subject image. A resulting image has a potential to portray better anatomical information than a conventional monochromatic image. To evaluate the performance of colorized medical modality, the structural similarity index and the peak signal to noise ratio are computed. Supremacy of proposed colorization is validated by segmentation experiments and compared with greyscale monochromatic images

Pigmented nodular melanoma: the predictive value of dermoscopic features using multivariate analysis

BACKGROUND: Nodular melanoma (NM), representing 10-30% of all melanomas, plays a major role in global mortality related to melanoma. Nonetheless, the literature on dermoscopy of NM is scanty. OBJECTIVES: To assess odds ratios (ORs) to quantify dermoscopic features of pigmented NM vs. pigmented superficial spreading melanoma (SSM), and pigmented nodular nonmelanocytic and benign melanocytic lesions. METHODS: To assess the presence or absence of global patterns and dermoscopic criteria, digitized images of 457 pigmented skin lesions from patients with a histopathological diagnosis of NM (n = 75), SSM (n = 93), and nodular nonmelanocytic and benign melanocytic lesions (n = 289; namely, 39 basal cell carcinomas, 85 seborrhoeic keratoses, 81 blue naevi, and 84 compound/dermal naevi) were retrospectively collected and blindly evaluated by three observers. RESULTS: Multivariate analysis showed that ulceration (OR 4.07), homogeneous disorganized pattern (OR 10.76), and homogeneous blue pigmented structureless areas (OR 2.37) were significantly independent prognostic factors for NM vs. SSM. Multivariate analysis of dermoscopic features of NM vs. nonmelanocytic and benign melanocytic lesions showed that the positive correlating features leading to a significantly increased risk of NM were asymmetric pigmentation (OR 6.70), blue-black pigmented areas (OR 7.15), homogeneous disorganized pattern (OR 9.62), a combination of polymorphous vessels and milky-red globules/areas (OR 23.65), and polymorphous vessels combined with homogeneous red areas (OR 33.88). CONCLUSIONS: Dermoscopy may be helpful in improving the recognition of pigmented NM by revealing asymmetric pigmentation, blue-black pigmented areas, homogeneous disorganized pattern and abnormal vascular structures, including polymorphous vessels, milky-red globules/areas and homogeneous red areas

The Sleeping Brain's Influence on Verbal Memory: Boosting Resistance to Interference

Memories evolve. After learning something new, the brain initiates a complex set of post-learning processing that facilitates recall (i.e., consolidation). Evidence points to sleep as one of the determinants of that change. But whenever a behavioral study of episodic memory shows a benefit of sleep, critics assert that sleep only leads to a temporary shelter from the damaging effects of interference that would otherwise accrue during wakefulness. To evaluate the potentially active role of sleep for verbal memory, we compared memory recall after sleep, with and without interference before testing. We demonstrated that recall performance for verbal memory was greater after sleep than after wakefulness. And when using interference testing, that difference was even more pronounced. By introducing interference after sleep, this study confirms an experimental paradigm that demonstrates the active role of sleep in consolidating memory, and unmasks the large magnitude of that benefit

Co-culture of primary rat hepatocytes with rat liver epithelial cells enhances interleukin-6-induced acute-phase protein response

Three different primary rat hepatocyte culture methods were compared for their ability to allow the secretion of fibrinogen and albumin under basal and IL-6-stimulated conditions. These culture methods comprised the co-culture of hepatocytes with rat liver epithelial cells (CC-RLEC), a collagen type I sandwich culture (SW) and a conventional primary hepatocyte monolayer culture (ML). Basal albumin secretion was most stable over time in SW. Fibrinogen secretion was induced by IL-6 in all cell culture models. Compared with ML, CC-RLEC showed an almost three-fold higher fibrinogen secretion under both control and IL-6-stimulated conditions. Induction of fibrinogen release by IL-6 was lowest in SW. Albumin secretion was decreased after IL-6 stimulation in both ML and CC-RLEC. Thus, cells growing under the various primary hepatocyte cell culture techniques react differently to IL-6 stimulation with regard to acute-phase protein secretion. CC-RLEC is the preferred method for studying cytokine-mediated induction of acute-phase proteins, because of the pronounced stimulation of fibrinogen secretion upon IL-6 exposure under these conditions

Memory for Semantically Related and Unrelated Declarative Information: The Benefit of Sleep, the Cost of Wake

Numerous studies have examined sleep's influence on a range of hippocampus-dependent declarative memory tasks, from text learning to spatial navigation. In this study, we examined the impact of sleep, wake, and time-of-day influences on the processing of declarative information with strong semantic links (semantically related word pairs) and information requiring the formation of novel associations (unrelated word pairs). Participants encoded a set of related or unrelated word pairs at either 9am or 9pm, and were then tested after an interval of 30 min, 12 hr, or 24 hr. The time of day at which subjects were trained had no effect on training performance or initial memory of either word pair type. At 12 hr retest, memory overall was superior following a night of sleep compared to a day of wakefulness. However, this performance difference was a result of a pronounced deterioration in memory for unrelated word pairs across wake; there was no sleep-wake difference for related word pairs. At 24 hr retest, with all subjects having received both a full night of sleep and a full day of wakefulness, we found that memory was superior when sleep occurred shortly after learning rather than following a full day of wakefulness. Lastly, we present evidence that the rate of deterioration across wakefulness was significantly diminished when a night of sleep preceded the wake period compared to when no sleep preceded wake, suggesting that sleep served to stabilize the memories against the deleterious effects of subsequent wakefulness. Overall, our results demonstrate that 1) the impact of 12 hr of waking interference on memory retention is strongly determined by word-pair type, 2) sleep is most beneficial to memory 24 hr later if it occurs shortly after learning, and 3) sleep does in fact stabilize declarative memories, diminishing the negative impact of subsequent wakefulness