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ESD effectively achieved a high rate of en bloc resection. However, the perforation rate was substantial; hence, improvement in the ESD method is required. The outcomes of ESD, especially for early colorectal malignancies, need to be assessed further.

The partition-defective 3 (PAR-3) protein is implicated in the formation of tight junctions at epithelial cell-cell contacts. We investigated DNA copy number aberrations in human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) cell lines using a high-density oligonucleotide microarray and found a homozygous deletion of PARD3 (the gene encoding PAR-3). Exogenous expression of PARD3 in ESCC cells lacking this gene enhanced the recruitment of zonula occludens 1 (ZO-1), a marker of tight junctions, to sites of cell-cell contact. Conversely, knockdown of PARD3 in ESCC cells expressing this gene caused a disruption of ZO-1 localization at cell-cell borders. A copy number loss of PARD3 was observed in 15% of primary ESCC cells. Expression of PARD3 was significantly reduced in primary ESCC tumors compared with their nontumorous counterparts, and this reduced expression was associated with positive lymph node metastasis and poor differentiation. Our results suggest that deletion and reduced expression of PARD3 may be a novel mechanism that drives the progression of ESCC.

The energy-momentum tensor plays an important role in QCD thermodynamics. Its expectation value contains information of the pressure and the energy density as its diagonal part. Further properties like viscosity and specific heat can be extracted from its correlation function. A nonperturbative evaluation of it on the lattice is called. Recently a new method based on the gradient flow was introduced to calculate the energy-momentum tensor on the lattice, and has been successfully applied to quenched QCD. In this paper, we apply the gradient flow method to calculate the energy-momentum tensor in ( We also apply the gradient flow method to evaluate the chiral condensate taking advantage of the gradient flow method that renormalized quantities can be directly computed avoiding the difficulty of explicit chiral violation with lattice quarks. We compute the renormalized chiral condensate in the MS scheme at renormalization scale µ = 2 GeV with a high precision to study the temperature dependence of the chiral condensate and its disconnected susceptibility. Even with the Wilson-type quark action which violates the chiral symmetry explicitly, we obtain the chiral condensate and its disconnected susceptibility showing a clear signal of pseudocritical temperature at T ∼ 190 MeV related to the chiral restoration crossover.

To clarify the characteristics of esophageal squamous papillomas (ESPs) in the Japanese population, we investigated 38 ESPs of 35 Japanese patients from a file with 17,387 upper gastrointestinal endoscopies in our university hospital. ESPs accounted for 0.20% of the total number of endoscopies and comprised 21 females and 14 males with an average age of 59.2 years. More than half of the ESPs (52.6%) were located in the middle esophagus. The ratio of human papilloma virus (HPV) positive ESPs was 10.5% and all were located in the middle esophagus of female patients only. HPV-positive ESP cases were younger (46.8 years) than HPV-negative cases (60.8 years). Based on comparison with the reports from western countries, we attribute the low prevalence in the lower esophagus to the relatively fewer occurrences of severe reflux esophagitis (RE) due to chronic gastritis with low gastric acid secretion among Japanese patients.

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Purpose. The aim of this study was to examine the characteristics of difficult cases and the learning curve in colorectal endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD). Methods. We studied 518 colorectal tumors treated by ESD. Patients were divided into 2 groups such as the difficult ESD group and non-difficult ESD group in view of procedure time and procedure speed, respectively. The clinical features in each group were analyzed, and we also examined cases with severe fibrosis. Furthermore, we divided all cases into 5 periods according to experience of ESDs and investigated the rates of difficult and perforation cases. Results. In view of both procedure time and procedure speed, there were significant differences about mean tumor size, rates of severe fibrosis and perforation, and en bloc resection rate between the two groups. Severe fibrosis was detected in protruding tumors >40 mm in diameter. With respect to the learning curve, the rate of difficult and perforation cases decreased significantly in the late periods compared to the first period. Conclusions. Large tumor size, high rates of severe fibrosis and perforation, and low rate of en bloc resection are related with difficult ESD cases. The increasing of experiences can decrease the rate of difficult cases and perforation.

ID: UMIN 000007972.