Unexpected and Rare Sites of Metastasis in Oncologic Patients.

Case studies of rare oncologic metastases are an important source of clinical data for health care professionals and researchers. While infrequent, the knowledge base and clinical recommendations derived from such cases aid in advancements in the field. As such, we aim to add five cases to the growing body of literature. The first two male patients, aged 69 and 73, were diagnosed with colon adenocarcinoma, suspected to be a second primary prostate carcinoma, following positron emission tomography-computer tomography (PET-CT). This suspicion was ruled out by prostatectomy and histopathological investigations, which instead found adenocarcinoma of colonic origin. The next two male patients, ages 63 and 68, were diagnosed, respectively, with metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma with cardiac metastases and metastatic melanoma with distant metastases to the pancreas. The final patient was a 73-year-old male diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer after a radiological investigation of suspected renal cell carcinoma.

Metabolic Activity Assessment by 18F-Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography in Patients after COVID-19 Vaccination.

In the following report, we describe 11 patients with various diagnoses and different treatment statuses (newly diagnosed, receiving treatment, or follow-up) of oncological diseases (breast, lymphoma, melanoma, and head and neck cancers). The patients underwent PET-CT for disease staging or follow-up and it was noted that all patients had areas of hypermetabolic uptake in the axillary lymph-nodes of the ipsilateral upper extremity where the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine was administered. Following further investigations, including an ultrasound (US), biopsies and an examination of medical records, it was concluded that these findings were the result of the vaccination and not a progression of pre-existing disease.

The medial temporal lobe in nociception: a meta-analytic and functional connectivity study.

Recent neuroimaging studies implicate the medial temporal lobe (MTL) in nociception and pain modulation. Here, we aim to identify which subregions of the MTL are involved in human pain and to test its connectivity in a cohort of chronic low-back pain patients (CBP). We conducted 2 coordinate-based meta-analyses to determine which regions within the MTL showed consistent spatial patterns of functional activation (1) in response to experimental pain in healthy participants and (2) in chronic pain compared with healthy participants. We followed PRISMA guidelines and performed activation likelihood estimate (ALE) meta-analyses. The first meta-analysis revealed consistent activation in the right anterior hippocampus (right antHC), parahippocampal gyrus, and amygdala. The second meta-analysis revealed consistently less activation in patients' right antHC, compared with healthy participants. We then conducted a seed-to-voxel resting state functional connectivity of the right antHC seed with the rest of the brain in 77 CBP and 79 age-matched healthy participants. We found that CBP had significantly weaker antHC functional connectivity to the medial prefrontal cortex compared with healthy participants. Taken together, these data indicate that the antHC has abnormally lower activity in chronic pain and reduced connectivity to the medial prefrontal cortex in CBP. Future studies should investigate the specific role of the antHC in the development and management of chronic pain.