Serum Müllerian inhibiting substance levels are lower in premenopausal women with breast precancer and cancer

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In preclinical studies, müllerian inhibiting substance (MIS) has a protective affect against breast cancer. Our objective was to determine whether serum MIS concentrations were associated with cancerous or precancerous lesions. Blood from 30 premenopausal women was collected and serum extracted prior to their undergoing breast biopsy to assess a suspicious lesion found on imaging or physical examination. Based on biopsy results, the serum specimens were grouped as cancer (invasive or ductal carcinoma <it>in situ</it>), precancer (atypical hyperplasia or lobular carcinoma <it>in situ</it>), or benign.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>Serum from women with cancer and precancer (p = .0009) had lower MIS levels than serum from women with benign disease.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our findings provide preliminary evidence for MIS being associated with current breast cancer risk, which should be validated in a larger population.</p

The effect of high dose antibiotic impregnated cement on rate of surgical site infection after hip hemiarthroplasty for fractured neck of femur : a protocol for a double-blind quasi randomised controlled trial

Background: Mortality following hip hemiarthroplasty is in the range of 10-40% in the first year, with much attributed to post-operative complications. One such complication is surgical site infection (SSI), which at the start of this trial affected 4.68% of patients in the UK having this operation. Compared to SSI rates of elective hip surgery, at less than 1%, this figure is elevated. The aim of this quasi randomised controlled trial (RCT) is to determine if high dose antibiotic impregnated cement can reduce the SSI in patients at 12-months after hemiarthroplasty for intracapsular fractured neck of femur. Methods: 848 patients with an intracapsular fractured neck of femur requiring a hip hemiarthroplasty are been recruited into this two-centre double-blind quasi RCT. Participants were recruited before surgery and quasi randomised to standard care or intervention group. Participants, statistician and outcome assessors were blind to treatment allocation throughout the study. The intervention consisted of high dose antibiotic impregnated cement consisting of 1 gram Clindamycin and 1 gram of Gentamicin. The primary outcome is Health Protection Agency (HPA) defined deep surgical site infection at 12 months. Secondary outcomes include HPA defined superficial surgical site infection at 30 days, 30 and 90-day mortality, length of hospital stay, critical care stay, and complications. Discussion: Large randomised controlled trials assessing the effectiveness of a surgical intervention are uncommon, particularly in the speciality of orthopaedics. The results from this trial will inform evidence-based recommendations for antibiotic impregnated cement in the management of patients with a fractured neck of femur undergoing a hip hemiarthroplasty. If high dose antibiotic impregnated cement is found to be an effective intervention, implementation into clinical practice could improve long-term outcomes for patients undergoing hip hemiarthroplasty

Duplication cyst of pyloroduodenal canal: a rare cause of neonatal gastric outlet obstruction: a case report

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens

QCD-like theories at nonzero temperature and density

We investigate the properties of hot and/or dense matter in QCD-like theories with quarks in a (pseudo)real representation of the gauge group using the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model. The gauge dynamics is modeled using a simple lattice spin model with nearest-neighbor interactions. We first keep our discussion as general as possible, and only later focus on theories with adjoint quarks of two or three colors. Calculating the phase diagram in the plane of temperature and quark chemical potential, it is qualitatively confirmed that the critical temperature of the chiral phase transition is much higher than the deconfinement transition temperature. At a chemical potential equal to half of the diquark mass in the vacuum, a diquark Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) phase transition occurs. In the two-color case, a Ginzburg-Landau expansion is used to study the tetracritical behavior around the intersection point of the deconfinement and BEC transition lines, which are both of second order. We obtain a compact expression for the expectation value of the Polyakov loop in an arbitrary representation of the gauge group (for any number of colors), which allows us to study Casimir scaling at both nonzero temperature and chemical potential.Comment: JHEP class, 31 pages, 7 eps figures; v2: error in Eq. (3.11) fixed, two references added; matches published versio

Clustering daily patterns of human activities in the city

Data mining and statistical learning techniques are powerful analysis tools yet to be incorporated in the domain of urban studies and transportation research. In this work, we analyze an activity-based travel survey conducted in the Chicago metropolitan area over a demographic representative sample of its population. Detailed data on activities by time of day were collected from more than 30,000 individuals (and 10,552 households) who participated in a 1-day or 2-day survey implemented from January 2007 to February 2008. We examine this large-scale data in order to explore three critical issues: (1) the inherent daily activity structure of individuals in a metropolitan area, (2) the variation of individual daily activities—how they grow and fade over time, and (3) clusters of individual behaviors and the revelation of their related socio-demographic information. We find that the population can be clustered into 8 and 7 representative groups according to their activities during weekdays and weekends, respectively. Our results enrich the traditional divisions consisting of only three groups (workers, students and non-workers) and provide clusters based on activities of different time of day. The generated clusters combined with social demographic information provide a new perspective for urban and transportation planning as well as for emergency response and spreading dynamics, by addressing when, where, and how individuals interact with places in metropolitan areas.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and PlanningUnited States. Dept. of Transportation (Region One University Transportation Center)Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technolog

High-resolution radiation hybrid mapping in wheat: an essential tool for the construction of the wheat physical maps

ArtigoO poema épico da época moderna nasce na literatura portuguesa como oceânico logo a partir da sua gestação. Este estudo enquadra a sua génese num contexto europeu.Università di Roma, La Sapienz

Quantum Gravity in Everyday Life: General Relativity as an Effective Field Theory

This article is meant as a summary and introduction to the ideas of effective field theory as applied to gravitational systems. Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Effective Field Theories 3. Low-Energy Quantum Gravity 4. Explicit Quantum Calculations 5. ConclusionsComment: 56 pages, 2 figures, JHEP style, Invited review to appear in Living Reviews of Relativit

Exploiting Clinical Trial Data Drastically Narrows the Window of Possible Solutions to the Problem of Clinical Adaptation of a Multiscale Cancer Model

The development of computational models for simulating tumor growth and response to treatment has gained significant momentum during the last few decades. At the dawn of the era of personalized medicine, providing insight into complex mechanisms involved in cancer and contributing to patient-specific therapy optimization constitute particularly inspiring pursuits. The in silico oncology community is facing the great challenge of effectively translating simulation models into clinical practice, which presupposes a thorough sensitivity analysis, adaptation and validation process based on real clinical data. In this paper, the behavior of a clinically-oriented, multiscale model of solid tumor response to chemotherapy is investigated, using the paradigm of nephroblastoma response to preoperative chemotherapy in the context of the SIOP/GPOH clinical trial. A sorting of the model's parameters according to the magnitude of their effect on the output has unveiled the relative importance of the corresponding biological mechanisms; major impact on the result of therapy is credited to the oxygenation and nutrient availability status of the tumor and the balance between the symmetric and asymmetric modes of stem cell division. The effect of a number of parameter combinations on the extent of chemotherapy-induced tumor shrinkage and on the tumor's growth rate are discussed. A real clinical case of nephroblastoma has served as a proof of principle study case, demonstrating the basics of an ongoing clinical adaptation and validation process. By using clinical data in conjunction with plausible values of model parameters, an excellent fit of the model to the available medical data of the selected nephroblastoma case has been achieved, in terms of both volume reduction and histological constitution of the tumor. In this context, the exploitation of multiscale clinical data drastically narrows the window of possible solutions to the clinical adaptation problem