OBJECTIVE Patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma experience highly variable outcomes despite receiving similar therapeutic regimens. Identifying biomarkers that predict survival and guide individualized therapy is urgently needed. Cystatin C has been explored as a valuable prognostic marker in several malignancies. We retrospectively assessed the relationship between serum cystatin C levels and...

The patient's delay in the visit to a hospital seems to play an important role in prognosis in invasive cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). This report explored prognostic factors of cutaneous SCC focusing on patient delay in hospital visit. Data of 117 Japanese patients who were treated for invasive cutaneous SCC in our facility between 2000 and 2010 were used for analysis. A multivariate...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to determine the risk and cofactors for HIV acquisition during pregnancy and postpartum. DESIGN A prospective cohort study METHODS : Pregnant women in western Kenya were enrolled if HIV seronegative at that visit or within 3 months. Serial HIV nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs) were conducted at 1 to 3-month intervals to 9 months postpartum. Ge...

Results—The delay to assessment was a median of 10 days. The adjusted incidence of the outcome cluster recurrent stroke, myocardial infarction or vascular death after stroke was significantly higher with higher levels of IL-6 (75 to 25 percentile hazard ratio, 1.56; 95% CI, 1.37–1.77), C-reactive protein (75 to 25 percentile hazard ratio, 1.08; 95% CI, 1.04–1.11), and fibrinogen (75 to 25 perce...

OBJECTIVE Multigene predictors are being used increasingly in early-stage breast cancer patients for prediction and prognosis. However, one consequence of the increased use of multigene predictors, and the heightened efforts toward their incorporation into routine clinical practice, is the potential for future malpractice litigation. It is, therefore, important to ascertain the strength of the ...

The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of social engagement and patterns of change in social engagement over time on mortality in a large population, aged 45 years or older. Data from the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging from 2006 and 2012 were assessed using longitudinal data analysis. We included 8,234 research subjects at baseline (2006). The primary analysis was based o...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Most Stroke Belt studies define exposure based on residence at stroke onset. We assessed whether residence in the Stroke Belt during childhood confers extra stroke risk in adulthood, even among people who left the region. METHODS Stroke-free Health and Retirement Study participants (n=18 070) followed up (average, 8.4 years) for first stroke (1452 events) were classifie...

AIMS To determine the effect of family history on the likelihood of vasovagal syncope. METHODS AND RESULTS Sixty-two medical students and 228 first-degree relatives were studied. Vasovagal syncope was ascertained with the Calgary syncope symptom score. The effects of the sex of the subject and parental syncope history on the likelihood of offspring fainting were described using Kaplan-Meier e...

AIMS Regulatory requirements for new drugs have increased. Special approval procedures with priority assessment are possible for drugs with clear 'unmet medical need'. We question whether these Exceptional Circumstances (EC) or Conditional Approval (CA) procedures have led to a higher probability of serious safety issues. METHODS A retrospective cohort study was performed of new drugs approve...

A cross-sectional study evaluated 182 students in the last two years of medical school and 70 residents of a national hospital in Peru on the risk indicators used for reporting results in clinical trials. A questionnaire was used to assess the ability to recognize and calculate risk indicators most widely used in the epidemiological literature. From the participants, 19.4% did not recognize any...