The series of ordered mutations that cause a specific cell to become cancerous is modeled so that the fraction of a risk population (e.g. White men) that has developed a specific cancer (e.g. melanoma) at any age can be calculated. The saturated model constructed and solved here is isomorphic to the physical model describing an ordered chain of radioactive nuclei decays with the exception that ...

PURPOSE To investigate a rationale of pancreatobiliary cancers, thymidylate synthase (TS) and dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (DPD) concentrations in cancer tissues were evaluated. PATIENTS AND METHODS Twenty-nine patients with pancreatic cancer (PC) and 43 with biliary tract cancer (BTC; 27 cases of bile duct cancer, 8 of gallbladder cancer and 8 of cancer of the papillary area) were include...

BACKGROUND Oral squamous cell carcinomas often develop in a pre-cancerous field, defined as mucosal epithelium with cancer-related genetic alterations, and which may appear as a clinically visible lesion. The test characteristics of three genetic assays that were developed to detect pre-cancerous fields were investigated and compared to histology. METHODS In total, 10 pre-cancerous fields tha...

Prostate cancer (PCa) is diagnosed by means of needle biopsies typically guided by transrectalultrasound (TRUS). TRUS provides an inexpensive and effective means of visualizing gland anatomy and systematically directing each biopsy needle to a specific region within the gland. However, identification of cancerous regions in the prostate cannot be performed reliably using TRUS imaging or any oth...

Recent studies have demonstrated that natural antisense transcripts, which are complementary sequences to messenger RNA, have important cellular functions such as the stabilization and silencing of mRNA. However, the possible contribution of antisense transcripts in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) development has not been described. Therefore, we s...

OBJECTIVE Despite recent advances in imaging and core or endoscopic biopsies, a percentage of patients have a major lung resection without diagnosis. We aimed to assess the feasibility of a rapid tissue preparation/analysis to discriminate cancerous from non-cancerous lung tissue. METHODS Fresh sample preparations were analyzed with the Microflex LTTM MALDI-TOF analyzer. Each main reference s...

BACKGROUND Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α (PPARα) regulates lipid metabolism in the liver. It is unclear, however, how this receptor changes in liver cancer tissue. On the other hand, mouse carcinogenicity studies showed that PPARα is necessary for the development of liver cancer induced by peroxisome proliferators, and the relationship between PPARα and the development of liver c...