BACKGROUND To investigate serum carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) as a prognostic factor for rectal cancer patients receiving pre-operative chemoradiotherapy (CRT). METHODS Between 2000 and 2009, 138 patients with advanced rectal cancer receiving CRT before surgery at our hospital were retrospectively classified into 3 groups: pre-CRT CEA <6 ng/ml (group L; n = 87); pre-CRT CEA ≥ 6 ng/ml and pos...

BACKGROUND In Multicenter Automatic Defibrillator Implantation Trial-Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (MADIT-CRT), patients with non-left bundle branch block (LBBB; including right bundle branch block, intraventricular conduction delay) did not have clinical benefit from cardiac resynchronization therapy with defibrillator (CRT-D). We hypothesized that baseline PR interval modulates clinical r...

Turbocharged CNG engines produce high NOx emission due to the fuel type and high combustion temperature. In this research, the effects of lean-burn and waste gate opening pressure threshold on NOx emission are studied theoretically and experimentally at WOT condition as well as 13-mode ECE-R49 test cycle. A code is developed in MATLAB environment for predicting engine NOx and the results are va...

BACKGROUND Cardiac resynchronization (CRT) prolongs survival in patients with systolic heart failure and QRS prolongation. However, most trials excluded patients with permanent atrial fibrillation. METHODS AND RESULTS The Resynchronization for Ambulatory Heart Failure Trial (RAFT) randomized patients to an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) or ICD+CRT, stratified by the presence of ...

Objective: Inhibition of lipid metabolism in breast cancer has been suggested as an effective approach for cancer therapy. Saffron-derived crocetin (Crt) and crocin (Cro) with the known anticancer activity, have shown hypolipidemic effect in diabetes and atherosclerosis. Here, we investigated the effect of Crt/Cro on lipid content in breast cancer. Materials and M...

Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) has been demonstrated to improve symptoms and survival in patients with left ventricular (LV) systolic dysfunction and dyssynchrony. To achieve this goal, the LV lead should be positioned in a region of delayed contraction. We hypothesized that pacing at the site of late electrical activation was also associated with long-term response to CRT. We conducte...

introduction: although surgery is the corner stone of treatment for esophageal cancer, there have been widespread efforts to find new methods of treatment .therefore, neoadjuant crt certainly increases the rate of resectability and 3 years survival .in our research, we reviewed effects of neoadjuant rct on short-term complications and hospital mortalities. materials & methods: 114 cases of esop...

n-terminal pro β-type natriuretic peptide (nt-probnp) is a valuable marker for monitoring the response to treatment in patients with heart failure. based on the clinically observed improvement of heart failure symptoms early after cardiac resynchronization therapy (crt), we sought to investigate whether crt induce any significant reduction in the plasma level of nt-probnp in three days after im...

PURPOSE To investigate the associations of ERBB 2 overexpression with chemoradiation therapy (CRT) resistance and cancer-specific survival (CSS) in muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) patients treated with the CRT-based bladder-sparing protocol. METHODS AND MATERIALS From 1997 to 2012, 201 patients with cT2-4aN0M0 bladder cancer were treated with CRT (40 Gy with concurrent cisplatin) follow...