Charged Particles from Nuclear Reactions Induced by Medium-Energy Protons

This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant PHY 76-84033 and Indiana Universit

Global surveillance of cancer survival 1995-2009: analysis of individual data for 25,676,887 patients from 279 population-based registries in 67 countries (CONCORD-2)

BACKGROUND: Worldwide data for cancer survival are scarce. We aimed to initiate worldwide surveillance of cancer survival by central analysis of population-based registry data, as a metric of the effectiveness of health systems, and to inform global policy on cancer control. METHODS: Individual tumour records were submitted by 279 population-based cancer registries in 67 countries for 25·7 million adults (age 15-99 years) and 75,000 children (age 0-14 years) diagnosed with cancer during 1995-2009 and followed up to Dec 31, 2009, or later. We looked at cancers of the stomach, colon, rectum, liver, lung, breast (women), cervix, ovary, and prostate in adults, and adult and childhood leukaemia. Standardised quality control procedures were applied; errors were corrected by the registry concerned. We estimated 5-year net survival, adjusted for background mortality in every country or region by age (single year), sex, and calendar year, and by race or ethnic origin in some countries. Estimates were age-standardised with the International Cancer Survival Standard weights. FINDINGS: 5-year survival from colon, rectal, and breast cancers has increased steadily in most developed countries. For patients diagnosed during 2005-09, survival for colon and rectal cancer reached 60% or more in 22 countries around the world; for breast cancer, 5-year survival rose to 85% or higher in 17 countries worldwide. Liver and lung cancer remain lethal in all nations: for both cancers, 5-year survival is below 20% everywhere in Europe, in the range 15-19% in North America, and as low as 7-9% in Mongolia and Thailand. Striking rises in 5-year survival from prostate cancer have occurred in many countries: survival rose by 10-20% between 1995-99 and 2005-09 in 22 countries in South America, Asia, and Europe, but survival still varies widely around the world, from less than 60% in Bulgaria and Thailand to 95% or more in Brazil, Puerto Rico, and the USA. For cervical cancer, national estimates of 5-year survival range from less than 50% to more than 70%; regional variations are much wider, and improvements between 1995-99 and 2005-09 have generally been slight. For women diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2005-09, 5-year survival was 40% or higher only in Ecuador, the USA, and 17 countries in Asia and Europe. 5-year survival for stomach cancer in 2005-09 was high (54-58%) in Japan and South Korea, compared with less than 40% in other countries. By contrast, 5-year survival from adult leukaemia in Japan and South Korea (18-23%) is lower than in most other countries. 5-year survival from childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is less than 60% in several countries, but as high as 90% in Canada and four European countries, which suggests major deficiencies in the management of a largely curable disease. INTERPRETATION: International comparison of survival trends reveals very wide differences that are likely to be attributable to differences in access to early diagnosis and optimum treatment. Continuous worldwide surveillance of cancer survival should become an indispensable source of information for cancer patients and researchers and a stimulus for politicians to improve health policy and health-care systems

The genomics of heart failure: design and rationale of the HERMES consortium

Aims The HERMES (HEart failure Molecular Epidemiology for Therapeutic targets) consortium aims to identify the genomic and molecular basis of heart failure.Methods and results The consortium currently includes 51 studies from 11 countries, including 68 157 heart failure cases and 949 888 controls, with data on heart failure events and prognosis. All studies collected biological samples and performed genome-wide genotyping of common genetic variants. The enrolment of subjects into participating studies ranged from 1948 to the present day, and the median follow-up following heart failure diagnosis ranged from 2 to 116 months. Forty-nine of 51 individual studies enrolled participants of both sexes; in these studies, participants with heart failure were predominantly male (34-90%). The mean age at diagnosis or ascertainment across all studies ranged from 54 to 84 years. Based on the aggregate sample, we estimated 80% power to genetic variant associations with risk of heart failure with an odds ratio of >1.10 for common variants (allele frequency > 0.05) and >1.20 for low-frequency variants (allele frequency 0.01-0.05) at P Conclusions HERMES is a global collaboration aiming to (i) identify the genetic determinants of heart failure; (ii) generate insights into the causal pathways leading to heart failure and enable genetic approaches to target prioritization; and (iii) develop genomic tools for disease stratification and risk prediction.</p

1D and 2D correlation spectroscopy of muscle at 7T

A means of providing a detailed analysis of the chemicals involved in muscle metabolism and subsequent alterations with disease or drugs would be an important advance. Two examples of this include the effect of the cholesterol-lowering drugs, known as statins, that commonly cause muscle pain or weakness and can progress to rhabdomyolysis and mortality. The second is the relationship between skeletal muscle triglycerides and insulin resistance, obesity and exercise. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) can provide such information by reporting on the intramyocellular lipids (IMCL) and extramyocellular lipids (EMCL) in muscle. These two types of lipids reside in different compartments in muscle tissue and thus their protons are shielded differently. Non-invasive quantification of IMCL and EMCL by 1D and 2D 1 H MRS has been reported at 3T . However at 3T there is significant overlap or the resonances in the 1D and crosspeaks in the 2D MR spectra making assignment and definitive correlations with disease difficult. The goal here is to develop 1D and 2D MRS methods at the higher field strength of 7T in order to provide more detailed chemical information than is available at 3

Bone marrow 1D and 2D correlation MR spectroscopy at 7T

The altered chemistry of bone marrow has been shown to be indicative of disease. One-dimensional (1D) proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) at 1.5T has previously been used to non-invasively investigate a range of diseases including musculoskeletal tumors , anorexia nervosa , multiple myeloma and osteoporosis . The ratio of saturated to unsaturated lipids was indicative of diagnostic markers for osteoporosis. Two-dimensional (2D) MRS has been shown to be particularly amenable to monitoring lipid alterations with disease. In an attempt to unambiguously assign and monitor resonances, localized 2D correlation spectroscopy (L-COSY) of bone marrow at 1.5T was used to study acute leukemia patients. The results were ambiguous due to crosspeak overlap. The goal of the present study is to develop the L-COSY method to study bone marrow at the higher field strength of 7T and separate those lipid resonances that were composites at 1.5T

Double quantum spectroscopy using phase rotation at 7T

Phase-rotation is an alternative method to phase-cycling in acquisition of magnetic resonance spectroscopic data. Hennig was the first to propose a new method to acquire localised spectroscopic data, where by various scans are stored as rows in a two-dimensional (2D) matrix, which is then doubly Fourier transformed (FT) and a specific row is extracted to represent the 1D spectrum. Phase-rotation was also implemented in a STEAM pulse sequence . The aim of the present work is to implement the phase-roation technique on a high Bo whole body magnet