Declaration of interest None. The search for evidence of the effectiveness of interventions in medicine and the health sciences has a history dating back to the middle ages (Lancaster, 1994). Following the work of Fisher (1935) in theorising the design of the randomised controlled trial (RCT) as the most important method for establishing causality of interventions, RCTs have become widely used ...

Objective Pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma (PPGLs) are rare neuroendocrine tumors derived from the adrenal medulla or extra-adrenal paraganglioma from extra-adrenal chromaffin tissue. Although malignant PPGLs has miserable prognosis, the treatment strategy remains to be established. An internal radiation therapy using [131I]meta-iodobenzylguanidine (131I-mIBG) called MIBG therapy has been att...

Malignant pheochromocytomas respond to chemotherapy with a reduction in tumor size and catecholamine secretion. We investigated the usefulness of molecular imaging with meta-iodobenzylguanidine (MIBG) for evaluating the effects of chemotherapy in patients with malignant pheochromocytoma. Six patients were studied before and after 6 ± 4 months of combination chemotherapy with cyclophosphamide, v...

BACKGROUND Pheochromocytomas are catecholamine secreting tumors of the adrenal medulla chromaffin cells, however, when present extra-adrenally they are called paragangliomas. Paragangliomas rarely produce catecholamine in excess, which is evident by clinical symptoms, urine, and blood biochemistry. Total resection of these tumors can lead to complete clinical and biochemical resolution. This ca...

Experiments were designed to detect regional disruptions of adrenergic neurons in the hearts of living dogs. The neuron disruption was achieved by the application of phenol to the epicardium of the left ventricle. Evidence for denervation was the reduction in endogenous norepinephrine (NE) concentrations in the myocardium beneath the region of phenol treatment and toward the apex. Radiolabeled ...

BACKGROUND Hypertensive crisis (i.e., systolic blood pressure over 300 mmHg) is very rare during operation except pheochromocytoma, but it can be a fatal and embarrassing to surgeons and anesthesiologists. The right adrenal gland can be electrocauterized during a right hemi-hepatectomy. We report a case of hypertensive crisis during right hemi-hepatectomy in which the right adrenal gland was st...

A Fast Fourier Transform method for calculating the three-dimensional dose rate distribution for murine, human-tumor xenografts is outlined. The required input includes evenly-spaced activity slices which span the tumor. Numerical values in these slices are determined by quantitative 125I autoradiography. For the absorbed dose-rate calculation, we assume the activity from both 131I- and 90Y-lab...

Background: Cell-derived microvesicles (MVs) are vesicles released from activated or apoptotic cells. However, the levels of MVs in myocardial infarction have been found inconsistent in researches. Objective: To assess the association between MVs and myocardial infarction by conducting a meta-analysis. Methods: A systematic literature search on PubMed, Embase, Cochran, Google Scholar electr...

This paper examines whether the prevailing model of capitalism with its hallmark financial markets is the most productive and stable investment system to underpin the global economy into the future. It returns to the creation of the stock market in 1602 to examine the stock market’s origin without the presumption of its respectability. Often considered the genesis of modern corporations and con...

Scheduling is one of the core steps to efficiently exploit the capabilities of heterogeneous distributed computing systems and represents an NP-complete problem. Therefore, using meta-heuristic algorithms is a suitable approach in order to cope with its difficulty. In many meta-heuristic algorithms, generating individuals in the initial step has an important effect on the convergence behavior o...