The purpose of the present study was to determine whether contour abnormalities of the abdomen after breast reconstruction with abdominal flaps are related to the harvest of the rectus abdominis muscle. Abdominal contour was analyzed in 155 women who had breast reconstruction with abdominal flaps; 108 women had free transverse rectus abdominis muscle (TRAM) flaps, 37 had pedicled TRAM flaps, an...

BACKGROUND Skin flap necrosis is a common complication after mastectomy and breast reconstruction. It has been proven that nitroglycerin ointment, as a topical vasodilator, can decrease the rate of skin flap necrosis after mastectomy and breast reconstruction. However, nitroglycerin can cause several side effects, including headache, dizziness, and hypotension. The purpose of this study was to ...

PURPOSE Elective nephron sparing surgery is established as an alternative to radical nephrectomy for renal cell carcinoma if tumors are small (4 cm or less, stage T1a). We compared outcomes in patients with renal cell carcinoma 4 cm or less (small) vs more than 4 cm (large) who were treated with nephron sparing surgery. MATERIALS AND METHODS Between 1979 and 2006, 618 patients underwent elect...

PURPOSE A positive surgical margin (SM) during radical prostatectomy (RP) increases risk of biochemical recurrence. We evaluated the effect of nerve-sparing procedures on risk of positive SM for pT2- and pT3-category tumors. We hypothesized that nerve sparing would increase rates of pT2 positive margins. METHODS We evaluated a historical cohort of 9,915 consecutive RP patients treated at The ...

Reconciling the aims of feeding an ever more demanding human population and conserving biodiversity is a difficult challenge. Here, we explore potential solutions by assessing whether land sparing (farming for high yield, potentially enabling the protection of non-farmland habitat), land sharing (lower yielding farming with more biodiversity within farmland) or a mixed strategy would result in ...

A common approach to the conservation of farmland biodiversity and the promotion of multifunctional landscapes, particularly in landscapes containing only small remnants of non-crop habitats, has been to maintain landscape heterogeneity and reduce land-use intensity. In contrast, it has recently been shown that devoting specific areas of non-crop habitats to conservation, segregated from high-y...

The goal of this review is to summarize the rationale for and feasibility of hippocampal sparing techniques during brain irradiation. Radiotherapy is the most effective non-surgical treatment of brain tumors and with the improvement in overall survival for these patients over the last few decades, there is an effort to minimize potential adverse effects leading to possible worsening in quality ...

BACKGROUND With the increasing popularity of skin-sparing mastectomy techniques, implant-based breast reconstruction and use of perioperative radiation therapy, there is a growing need to scrutinize the effects they have on breast reconstruction. This study examined the effect of radiation on implant-based breast reconstruction in patients who had skin-sparing or conventional mastectomies in te...

Current consensus about treatment of HIV infection is that HAART must include two nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors plus a third drug (one non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor, a boosted protease inhibitor, an integrase strand transfer inhibitor and possibly a CCR5 inhibitor). There is a lot of interest about changing the basic structure of the antiretroviral regimen so we c...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the cerebral circulatory response to superimposed acute hypoxemia in growth-restricted fetuses with established brain-sparing flow (BSF) during basal conditions. MATERIAL AND METHODS 76 term fetuses suspected of growth restriction were exposed to Doppler velocimetry in the umbilical artery (UA) and middle cerebral artery (MCA), and in 38-39 cases also in Galen's vein ...