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BACKGROUND: Quality of Life (QOL) is an important health outcome measure in oncology. Given the underlying pressure of individual geo-political entities, a universal solution may not be applicable and hence there is a need to develop a regional tool and standardize the same to address the linguistic and socio-cultural factors. OBJECTIVE:To standardize a tool to assess the QOL of patients with cancer to suit the Indian scenario. years. Thirty-eight items were pooled from existing tools, reviews, and the field trial, by which face and factorial validity were established. Reliability of the tool was also tested. Correlation analysis was done to find out the relation between the domains of QOL. STATISTICS USED: Principal component method with varimax rotation was used. Spearmen product moment correlation and Cronbach alpha coefficient were used for reliability analysis. RESULTS:Ten factors emerged with Eigen values ranging from 8.55 to 1.10 and accounted for 62.6% of variance.The first factor contributed maximally, 22% of variance. The remaining nine factors contributed totally to 40% of the variance on QOL. The ten factors that emerged were psychological well being, self-adequacy, physical well being, confidence in self-ability, external support, pain, mobility, optimism and belief, interpersonal relationship and selfsufficiency and independence. The internal consistency using Cronbach alpha test was 0.90 and split-half reliability was 0.74. CONCLUSION: The tool was found to be highly reliable and valid. It was feasible to administer it at clinical settings.

Garlic has been used throughout the world to treat coughs, toothache, earache, dandruff, hypertension, hysteria, diarrhoea, dysentery, diptheria, vaginitis and many other conditions. Garlic contains a complex mixture of oil and water-soluble organosulfur compounds. Diallyl disulfide (DADS), an oil-soluble constituent of garlic seems to be effective in reducing tumour cells originating from colon, lung and skin. Hence our present study focuses on the dose-dependent effect of DADS on an androgen-dependent prostate cancer cell line. Various concentrations of DADS ranging from 25 to 100 microM were given to LNCaP cells and the activity of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) prostatic acid phosphatase (PAcP) and the level of prostate specific antigen were studied. DADS reduced the secretory activity of LNCaP cells with the gradual increase in dosage. DADS was found to act as a good antiproliferative agent, which was confirmed by proliferation assay. DADS also induced apoptosis and nuclear segmentation in the higher doses.

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The factor structure showed that QOL is a multidimensional concept having different aspects. The Cancer Institute QOL Questionnaire version II for cancer patients is found to be a valid and reliable tool and feasible to administer at the clinical settings.

We have studied the chemopreventive role of naringenin against experimental gastric carcinogenesis in male Wistar rats. The animals were divided into five groups and six animals were included in each group. Stomach, liver, sera and kidney specimens were collected in the 20th week and the level of glycoproteins namely, hexose, hexosamine, sialic acid and fucose, were measured in the control, gastric cancer-induced, cancer naringenin pretreated, cancer naringenin posttreated and naringenin alone animals. The glycoprotein levels were increased in the gastric cancer-induced rats when compared with the control rats. The levels of glycoprotein were decreased significantly in cancer-bearing rats supplemented with naringenin as compared with the gastric cancer-induced rats. The result shows the gastroprotective effect of naringenin and describes the likelihood of naringenin in maintaining the integrity of cell membranes and gastric mucosa against oxidative damage. Moreover, we hypothesize that regulation of glycoprotein levels by naringenin could be associated with the regression of N-methyl-N'-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine-induced gastric carcinoma.