No abstract

There is good evidence of the benefits of early detection of cancer and removal of adenomas in asymptomatic individuals; however, the widespread implementation of colorectal screening programs is resource‐dependent. Such programs have been widely implemented in high‐income regions and countries in North America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea, but such programs are few in low and middle‐income countries [35]. This article describes the implementation of a comprehensive approach to colorectal cancer screening in Shanghai, China.

Comparison of two hazard rates is important in applications that are related to times to occurrence of a specific event. Conventional comparison procedures, such as the log-rank, Gehan-Wilcoxon and Peto-Peto tests, are powerful only when the two hazard rates do not cross each other. Because crossing hazard rates are common in practice, several procedures have been proposed in the literature for comparing such rates. However, most of these procedures consider only the alternative hypothesis with crossing hazard rates; many other realistic cases, including those when the two hazard rates run parallel to each other, are excluded from consideration. We propose a two-stage procedure that considers all possible alternatives, including ones with crossing or running parallel hazard rates. To define its significance level and "p"-value properly, a new procedure for handling the crossing hazard rates problem is suggested, which has the property that its test statistic is asymptotically independent of the test statistic of the log-rank test. We show that the two-stage procedure, with the log-rank test and the suggested procedure for handling the crossing hazard rates problem used in its two stages, performs well in applications in comparing two hazard rates. Copyright 2008 Royal Statistical Society.

Bone Tumor TherapySignificant attention has been focused on bone tumor therapy recently. At present, the treatment in clinic typically requires surgical intervention. However, a few tumor cells remain around bone defects after surgery and subsequently proliferate within several days. Thus, fabrication of biomaterials with dual functions of tumor therapy and bone regeneration is significant. Herein, the injectable hydrogel containing cisplatin (DDP) and polydopamine-decorated nano-hydroxyapatite is prepared via Schiff base reaction between the aldehyde groups on oxidized sodium alginate and amino groups on chitosan. The hydrogel exhibits sustained release properties for DDP due to the immobilization of DDP via abundant functional groups on polydopamine (PDA). Additionally, given the intense absorption of PDA in the near-infrared region, the hydrogel exhibits excellent photothermal effects when exposed to the NIR laser (808 nm). Based on the properties, the hydrogel effectively ablates tumor cells (4T1 cells) in vitro and suppresses tumor growth in vivo. Furthermore, the hydrogel promotes the adhesion and proliferation of bone mesenchymal stem cells in vitro due to the abundant functional groups on PDA and further induces bone regeneration in vivo. Therefore, the study extends research on novel biomaterials with dual functions of tumor therapy and bone regeneration.