Application of combined intraperitoneal and intravenous neoadjuvant chemotherapy in senile patients with advanced ovarian cancer and massive ascites.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to explore the effects of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in senile patients with advanced ovarian can- cer and ascites. MATERIALS AND METHODS: One hundred eight senile patients with advanced ovarian cancer and ascites were randomly di- vided into two groups: experimental and control groups. Patients in the experimental group were treated with two courses of intraperitoneal combined with intravenous neoadjuvant chemotherapy, followed by cytoreductive surgery, and six courses of intravenous chemotherapy, while the patients in the control group only received cytoreductive surgery and six to eight courses of intravenous chemotherapy. RESULTS: The operation duration, blood loss, ideal success rate of cytoreductive surgery, and prognosis of the two groups were then compared. Thirty-eight patients in the experimental group successfully received cytoreductive surgery, accounting for 74.14%, while only 23 patients in the control group received cytoreductive surgery successfully, accounting for 46%, showing signifinificantly less than those in the control group (p < 0.001). However, the median survival and the median progression-free survival showed no statistical difference between the two groups (p > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Neoadjuvant chemotherapy can obviously shorten the operation duration, reduce the intraoperative blood loss, and improve the ideal success rate of cytoreductive surgery, but does not obviously improve the prognosis.

A developmental bias in reading frame usage by human fetal thymic TCRBDJ transcripts is not present in genomic TCRBDJ rearrangements.

We have previously reported that reading-frame usage and functional diversification is developmentally regulated, with virtually all TCRB DJ mRNA transcripts using a single reading frame at 8 weeks of gestational age, tapering to 50% by adult life. We used the polymerase chain reaction to create genomic libraries of DJ rearrangements in the TCRB locus from thymuses at 7.7, 10, and 16 weeks of gestational age, and from adult thymuses. Clones were randomly picked and sequenced to determine junctional sequences and reading-frame utilization. The resulting data address the hypothesis that cells bearing genomic joints in reading frame one are preferentially selected during fetal life. This hypothesis predicts that reading-frame bias would also be observed among genomic DJ joints. Instead, we observed random utilization of the three possible D-region reading frames among genomic D1s1 ==> J1s1 joints during fetal life. Similar results were obtained at 7.7 weeks of gestational age in a second thymus in which both RNA and DNA were simultaneously isolated and used to create libraries of TCRBDJ transcripts or rearrangements. We conclude that reading-frame utilization is random among genomic D1s1-JB1s1 rearrangements and that the preferential usage of a single reading frame among mRNA transcripts of TCRB DJ transcripts is the result of preferential transcription of genomic TCRB DJ joints in a single reading frame, or that TCRB DJ transcripts have a longer half-life than transcripts in reading frames two or three.