Received April 12, 2002; accepted January 24, 2003. Irinotecan is a water-soluble derivative of camptothecin, an alkylator originally extracted from the Chinese tree Camptotheca acuminata. Laboratory studies have demonstrated the activity of irinotecan in a broad panel of pediatric and adult central nervous system tumor xenografts in athymic nude mice. These studies led to a Phase II trial that...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether ventricular arrhythmia related to nocturnal hypoxaemia during Cheyne-Stokes respiration (CSR) explains the observation that CSR is an independent marker of death in heart failure. DESIGN Prospective, observational study. PATIENTS 101 patients at high risk of clinical serious ventricular arrhythmia fitted with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD). ...

BACKGROUND Reintervention after coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) is common. We sought to determine its occurrence and identify patient characteristics and operative techniques that influence the need or bias for reintervention. METHODS AND RESULTS From 1971 to 1998, 48,758 patients underwent primary isolated CABG, and 1000 patients per year were actively followed-up every 5 years (n =26...

Contact with bone marrow stromal cells is crucial for the normal growth and development of B-cell precursors. We have previously shown that human bone marrow stromal cell tyrosine kinase activity can be activated by direct contact with B-lymphoid cells (J Immunol 155:2359, 1995). In the present study, we show that increased tyrosine phosphorylation of focal adhesion kinase, paxillin, and extrac...

Abstract. The study of the identities of symmetry for the Bernoulli polynomials arises from the study of Gauss’s multiplication formula for the gamma function. There are many works in this direction. In the sense of p-adic analysis, the q-Bernoulli polynomials are natural extensions of the Bernoulli and Apostol-Bernoulli polynomials (see the introduction of this paper). By using the N-fold iter...

Slow pulse-to-pulse variation of intensity is very typical for overwhelming majority of known pulsars. However, a handful of pulsars have mysterious mechanism which can break such a stability. Phenomenon of generation GPs was first detected for Crab pulsar(B0531+21) [1] and the millisecond pulsar B1937+21 [2]. In following studies a set of typical characteristics of GPs was determined. These ar...

We have detected longitudinal magnetic fields between 2 and 4 kG in three (WD 0446−790, WD 1105−048, WD 2359−434) out of a sample of 12 normal DA white dwarfs by using optical spectropolarimetry done with the VLT Antu 8 m telescope equipped with FORS1. With the exception of 40 Eri B (4 kG) these are the first positive detections of magnetic fields in white dwarfs below 30 kG. Although suspected...

Chemotherapy resistance of tumors is an important biological and clinical problem. Studies Troni many tumor types have indicated that resistance may he hased on multiple genetic pathways. Human male (¡ermacell tumors (GCTs) are an especially good model system to study the genetic hasis of tumor sensitivity and resistance to chemotherapy. GCTs are exquisitely sensitive to treatment with DNA-dam...

Traditional dynamic shading systems are usually driven by electricity for continuously controlling the angle of blind slats to minimize the indoor solar heat gain over times. This paper proposed a novel design of buoyancy driven dynamic shading system, using only minimum amount of electricity. The energy performance and the improved thermal comfort induced by the system were simulated by Energy...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the common perception that more serious suicide attempts tend to occur earlier in the day. METHODS Prospective study of 158 adults referred for psychiatric assessment from the general hospital following an episode of deliberate self-harm. The main outcome measures used were Beck's Suicide Intent score, ICD-10 psychiatric diagnosis, alcohol consumption at the time of t...