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Basal cell carcinoma, which accounts for 70%-80% of all cutaneous malignancies in the United States, has increased recently in Japan. We compared methods for reconstruction after surgery for basal cell carcinoma, which is expected to increase further in the future. Thus patients who underwent reconstruction after surgery for basal cell carcinoma of the nose using medial forehead flaps and nasolabial flaps were selected, and the effectiveness of these flaps was compared by taking the size and location of the tissue defect into consideration. As a result, possibly because of anatomical and histological differences of the face between Caucasians and Asians, better results were obtained with nasolabial flaps than with median forehead flaps.

Finasteride is standard medical treatment for androgenetic alopecia; however, no large studies with 5 years or more of follow up have been performed in Japan. The authors followed Japanese men with androgenetic alopecia treated with finasteride for 5 years to evaluate long-term treatment efficacy. Of 903 men treated with finasteride (1 mg/day), 801 patients were evaluated over 5 years by modified global photographic assessment. Although the proportion of improvement was high (99.4%), modified global photographic assessment scores after 5 years of treatment were lower in patients with more advanced disease as measured by the modified Norwood-Hamilton scale. After separating patients into "sufficient" and "insufficient" efficacy groups according to the modified global photographic assessment score after 5 years (scores ≥6 and <6, respectively), multivariate analysis showed that independent risk factors of insufficient efficacy were age at start of treatment of 40 years or more (P = 0.021) and classification on the modified Norwood-Hamilton scale (P < 0.001), whereas presence of stress at start of treatment was a negative predictor (P = 0.025). In conclusion, continuous finasteride treatment for 5 years improved androgenetic alopecia with sustained effect among Japanese. Younger age and less advanced disease at start of treatment were the key predictors of higher finasteride efficacy.

Human bone marrow (BM) or mobilized peripheral blood (mPB) CD34+ cells have been shown to loose their stem cell quality during culture period more easily than those from cord blood (CB). We previously reported that human umbilical CB stem cells could effectively be expanded in the presence of human recombinant cytokines and a newly established murine bone marrow stromal cell line HESS-5. In this study we assessed the efficacy of this xenogeneic coculture system using human BM and mPB CD34 + cells as materials. We measured the generation of CD34

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