, the Discussion Paper series within each division and the Director General's Office of IFPRI were merged into one IFPRI-wide Discussion Paper series. The new series begins with number 00689, reflecting the prior publication of 688 discussion papers within the dispersed series. The earlier series are available on IFPRI's website at http://www.ifpri.org/publications/results/taxonomy%3A468. 2 IFPRI Discussion Papers contain preliminary material and research results. They have been peer reviewed, but have not been subject to a formal external review via IFPRI's Publications Review Committee. They are circulated in order to stimulate discussion and critical comment; any opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policies or opinions of IFPRI.

Expression of CD133, CD90, and EpCAM CSC markers may be linked to HCC tumor onset and/or progression. In addition, EpCAM expression is associated with shorter survival time, while CD90 expression is associated with early HCC recurrence.

Preoperative NLR ≥ 2.81 may be an indicator of poor DFS and OS in patients with HCC undergoing surgery. Preoperative NLR ≥ 2.81 may be a good complementary indicator of poor OS when elevated AFP levels provide no prognostic information.

Low crop yields in Sub-Saharan Africa are associated with low fertilizer use. To better understand patterns of, and opportunities for, fertilizer use, location specific fertilizer price data may be relevant. We compiled local market price data for urea fertilizer, a source of inorganic nitrogen, in 1729 locations in eighteen countries in two regions (West and East Africa) from 2010-2018 to understand patterns in the spatial variation in fertilizer prices. The average national price was lowest in Ghana (0.80 USD kg -1 ), Kenya (0.97 USD kg -1 ), and Nigeria (0.99 USD kg -1 ). Urea was most expensive in three landlocked countries (Burundi: 1.51, Uganda: 1.49, and Burkina Faso: 1.49 USD kg -1 ). Our study uncovers considerable spatial variation in fertilizer prices within African countries. We show that in many countries this variation can be predicted for unsampled locations by fitting models of prices as a function of longitude, latitude, and additional predictor variables that capture aspects of market access, demand and environmental conditions. Predicted within-country urea price variation (as a fraction of the median price) was particularly high in Kenya (0.77-1.12), Nigeria (0.83-1.34), Senegal (0.73-1.40), Tanzania (0.90-1.29) and Uganda (0.93-1.30), but much lower in Burkina Faso (0.96-1.04), Burundi (0.95-1.05), and Togo (0.94-1.05). The correlation coefficient of the country level models was between 0.17 to 0.83 (mean 0.52) and the RMSE varies from 0.005 to 0.188 (mean 0.095). In 10 countries, predictions were at least 25% better than a null-model that assumes no spatial variation. Our work indicates new opportunities for incorporating spatial variation in prices into efforts to understand the profitability of agricultural technologies across rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa.

As postoperative adjuvant TACE does not improve overall survival or reduce recurrence in HCC patients, further study is needed to clarify its clinical benefit.

Background: The influence of diabetes mellitus (DM) on the prognosis of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains controversial. Here we investigated the impact of DM on the prognosis of such patients after curative hepatectomy. Methods: A consecutive cohort of 505 patients with HCC (134 with DM, 371 without) underwent curative hepatectomy were retrospectively evaluated. Postoperative morbidity and mortality, overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) were compared between patients with or without DM. Independent prognostic predictors were identified using the Cox proportional hazards model. Results: Patients with or without DM showed similar morbidity and 30- and 90- day mortality after curative hepatectomy (all P>0.05), as well as similar DFS at 1, 3, 5 years (P = 0.781). However, the group of patients with DM showed significantly lower OS at 1, 3, 5 years than the group without DM (P = 0.038). Similar results were obtained in the propensity-matched cohort. Cox multivariate analysis identified DM as an independent predictor of poor OS, but not of poor DFS. We repeat compared OS and DFS for DM and non-DM subgroups defined according to the presence or absence of hepatitis B virus infection and cirrhosis. Similar results were obtained in all subgroups except the non-cirrhotic subgroup which showed patients with and without DM had similar OS. Conclusions: DM does not significantly affect the postoperative morbidity or mortality or the DFS of patients with HCC after curative hepatectomy. It is, however, associated with significantly lower OS, especially in patients with cirrhosis.

Rural populations face a much higher burden of child undernutrition than urban populations, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, a continent where many households still live in remote rural areas. Despite this, relatively little research has analyzed nutrition differences across rural and urban populations, or across gradients of rural remoteness. In this article, we study these differences in sub-Saharan Africa by linking spatial data on travel times to urban centers with 20,000 or more people as our measure of remoteness to Demographic Health Survey data covering 74,398 children from 10,900 communities in 23 countries. We find that children in rural communities have much worse linear growth and dietary outcomes than urban children, but that children in more remote rural communities face only a small nutritional penalty compared to children from less remote communities. Moreover, the harmful effects of remoteness and rural living largely disappear once we control for education, wealth, and social/infrastructural services. This implies that the key nutritional disadvantages faced by rural populations stem chiefly from social and economic poverty. Combating these problems requires a combination of innovative cost-effective mechanisms for extending basic services to isolated rural communities and facilitating welfare-enhancing migration to urban areas.JEL classifications: I15, O12, O18

Our propensity-score-matched study confirmed that HR was associated with higher survival rates than was TACE in patients with BCLC stage A HCC.