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HER2 protein overexpression correlated significantly with HER2 gene amplification in EOC (P = 0.027). It is surprising that all 4 cases of mucinous EOC showed HER2 gene amplification confirmed by FISH testing. However, we suppose that increasing the number of cases would possibly modify the results. This study also showed that both HER2 gene amplification and somatic mutations are not mutually exclusive in mucinous EOC. Further studies are warranted to investigate the potential role of anti-HER2 therapy.

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This study presents a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to simulate the three-dimensional airflow in the trachea before and after the vascular ring surgery (VRS). The simulation was based on CT-scan images of the patients with the vascular ring diseases. The surface geometry of the tracheal airway was reconstructed using triangular mesh by the Amira software package. The unstructured tetrahedral volume meshes were generated by the ANSYS ICEM CFD software package. The airflow in the tracheal airway was solved by the ESI CFD-ACE+ software package. Numerical simulation shows that the pressure drops across the tracheal stenosis before and after the surgery were 0.1789 and 0.0967 Pa, respectively, with the inspiratory inlet velocity 0.1 m/s. Meanwhile, the improvement percentage by the surgery was 45.95%. In the expiratory phase, by contrast, the improvement percentage was 40.65%. When the inspiratory velocity reached 1 m/s, the pressure drop became 4.988 Pa and the improvement percentage was 43.32%. Simulation results further show that after treatment the pressure drop in the tracheal airway was significantly decreased, especially for low inspiratory and expiratory velocities. The CFD method can be applied to quantify the airway pressure alteration and to evaluate the treatment outcome of the vascular ring surgery under different respiratory velocities.

The aim of this study was to explore whether matched or mismatched strains of influenza vaccines (IVs) are beneficial at reducing the risk of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in elderly persons.Data were obtained from the Longitudinal Health Database 2005 (LHID 2005) which is maintained by the National Health Insurance Research Institute in Taiwan. The analytical data included individuals who were vaccinated with mismatched vaccines during the October 2007 to December 2007 season and individuals vaccinated with matched strains during the October 2008 to December 2008 season. All participants were 65 years of age and older. In this analysis, individuals were considered to be exposed if their records showed that they were vaccinated against influenza, and they were considered to be nonexposed if they were not vaccinated during these seasons. A Cox hazard model was used to estimate AMI hazard ratio.This study enrolled 93,051 exposed and 109,007 unexposed individuals. The AMI hazards ratios (HRs) for the men and women exposed to mismatched vaccine (in 2007) were 0.990 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.745–1.316) and 1.102 (95% CI: 0.803–1.513), respectively. Men exposed to matched vaccines (in 2008) had significant HRs (HR: 0.681; 95% CI: 0.509–0.912) while the HRs in the women were barely significant (HR: 0.737; 95% CI: 0.527–1.029).AMI risk could be particularly reduced in men if the IV matches well with the circulating strains in elderly people 65 years of age and older.

Although HER2 overexpression and Her2 amplification have been noted in breast and a variety of human cancers, we report here for the first time the impact of polysomy-17 on HER2 status and the correlations between HER2 status and other prognostic factors in patients with epithelial ovarian cancers (EOC).We analyzed HER2, estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), p53, and Ki-67 protein overexpressions by immunohistochemistry (IHC) and determined Her2 gene amplification by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) in 27 tissue microarray samples from EOC patients.We achieved 100% positive concordance (3/3) and 100% negative concordance (19/19) between HER2 testing by IHC and FISH. Both the total Her2 gene copies and FISH scores increased significantly in a stepwise order through the negative, equivocal, and positive HER2 IHC result categories in all 27 cases (P=0.001, P=0.001), and still increased significantly in 18 nonpolysomy-17 cases (P=0.007 and 0.013) after the exclusion of 9 polysomy-17 cases. HER2 protein expression is inversely correlated with both ER (P=0.002) and PR expressions (P=0.046). Her2 gene amplification is inversely correlated with ER expression (P=0.007) but not with PR expression (P=0.106).This study showed extremely high positive and negative concordances between Her2 FISH and HER2 IHC assays. Polysomy-17 is insufficient for causing a significant impact on the relationship between HER2 testing by IHC and FISH in EOC. ER and PR expressions were inversely correlated with HER2 protein expression. In addition, ER but not PR expression is inversely correlated with Her2 gene amplification.

The pentalogy of Cantrell was first described in 1958 by Cantrell and coworkers, who reported five cases in which they described a pentad of findings including a midline supraumbilical thoracoabdominal wall defect, a defect of the Lower sternum, abnormalities of the diaphragmatic pericardium and the anterior diaphragm, and congenital cardiac anomalies. Trisomy 18 has an incidence of about 0.3 per 1000 newborns. We present a case of trisomy 18 with incomplete Cantrell syndrome. The patient presented with hypogenesis of the corpus callosum, vermian-cerebellar hypoplasia (Dandy-Walker variant), ventricular septal defect, dextrocardia, patent ductus arteriosus, a defect of the lower sternum, a midline supraumbilical abdominal wall defect with omphalocele, congenital left posterior diaphragmatic hernia (Bochdalek hernia), micrognathia, low-set and malformed ears, rocker-bottom feet, dorsiflexed hallux, hypoplastic nails, short neck, and wrist deformity. Trisomy 18 syndrome was unusually combined with the pentalogy of Cantrell. We present this case because of its rarity and high risk of mortality.