Aims-To report the special clinical manifestations and determine the appropriate management of infectious scleral ulceration. Methods-A retrospective study was performed on 30 eyes with infectious scleral ulceration. Information was recorded on patients' age, onset and course of disease, pathogenic organism, clinical presentations, methods of diagnosis, treatment, and outcome. Results-10 cases (33.3%) were accompanied by corneal involvement. Subconjunctival abscess was noted in 16 cases (53.3%). 17 cases (56.7%) gave positive results of pathogen culture and all were Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Two cases had combined bacterial infections and one case was complicated by fungal infection. A total of 26 cases had surgical debridement in this series. Extensive involvement of the sclera with the presence of a 'tunnel lesion' or a 'satellite subconjunctival abscess' were found during debridement. All of the eyeballs involved were salvaged except one. Conclusion-The results of this study were contrary to the poor prognosis presented in previous reports. Early and repetitive surgical debridement is believed to be mandatory in the intractable cases to shorten the admission period and to save these eyes. (Br J Ophthalmol 1997;81:980-983)

This paper proposes two methods for estimating panel data models with group specific parameters when group membership is not known. The first method uses the individual level time series estimates of the parameters to form threshold variables. The problem of parameter heterogeneity is turned into estimation of a panel threshold model with an unknown threshold value. The second method modifies the K-means algorithm to perform conditional clustering. Units are clustered based on the deviations between the individual and the group conditional means. The two approaches are used to analyze growth across countries and housing market dynamics across the states in the U.S.

BackgroundOsteopontin (OPN) can recruit macrophages to the site of inflammation and promote tumorigenesis. M2 tumor-associated macrophages (M2-TAMs) also play an important role in cancer progression. This study aimed to clarify the role of OPN and M2-TAMs co-existence in gastric cancer.MethodsThe levels of OPN and M2-TAMs were evaluated by immunohistochemical staining in 170 resected gastric cancer specimens that were collected from 1998 to 2012. M2-TAMs were identified by staining for an M2 marker, CD204. The prognostic significance and correlation between OPN and CD204 expression were analyzed. A co-culture system of OPN+-AGS and U937 cells was designed to study the effect of OPN on the skewing of macrophages toward M2-TAMs for gastric cancer progression in vitro and in vivo.ResultsPatients with high expression (>50%) of OPN or CD204 exhibited poor 5-year overall survival rates (48.61%, p = 0.0055, and 52.14%, p = 0.0498, respectively). A positive correlation was observed between OPN and CD204 expression and high co-expression of OPN and CD204 demonstrated poor 5-year overall survival rates (48.90%, p = 0.0131). In the co-culture study, OPN was able to attract U937 cells and skew them toward M2-TAMs through paracrine action. The M2-TAMs could increase the invasiveness of OPN+-AGS cells and the growth rate of xenograft of a mixture of co-cultured OPN+-AGS and U937 cells.ConclusionOPN can skew macrophages toward M2-TAMs during gastric cancer progression. The co-existence of OPN and infiltrating M2-TAMs correlates with disease progression and poor survival and thus can serve as a prognostic marker in gastric cancer.

Air quality, China, Environmental Kuznets curve, Latecomer,

This paper considers model selection and model averaging in panel data models with a multifactor error structure. We investigate the limiting distribution of the common correlated effects estimator (Pesaran, 2006) in a local asymptotic framework and show that the trade-off between bias and variance remains in the asymptotic theory. We then propose a focused information criterion and a plug-in averaging estimator for large heterogeneous panels and examine their theoretical properties. The novel feature of the proposed method is that it aims to minimize the sample analog of the asymptotic mean squared error and can be applied to cases irrespective of whether the rank condition holds or not. Monte Carlo simulations show that both proposed selection and averaging methods generally achieve lower expected squared error than other methods. The proposed methods are applied to analyze the consumer response to gasoline taxes.