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Aims. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between specific nurse care-giving behaviours and preterm infant behavioural responses during bathing and to identify nurse behaviours associated with infant ‘stress’. Background. Although recent advances in medical technology have improved neonatal intensive care, the high mortality and morbidity rates in preterm infants have not decreased proportionally. As caregivers strive to reduce infant mortality and morbidity, a factor for consideration is which caregiver behaviours are associated with preterm infant well-being. Design. A descriptive correlational design. Method. Convenience samples of 24 preterm infants and 12 nurses were recruited. A total of 120 baths were videotaped. Infant and nurse behaviours were measured using the coding schemes developed by the researchers. Pearson coefficient correlation, non-parametric Kruskal–Wallis test, t-test and generalised linear models were methods for data analysis. Results. As nurses provided more support, stress was reduced in the infants, and their self-regulation during the bath was enhanced especially by the use of ‘containment’ and ‘positional support’. Conversely, non-therapeutic caregiver behaviours including ‘rapid and rough handling’ of the baby, ‘chatting with other people’ and ‘inappropriate handling’ increased infant ‘stress’ during the bath. Conclusion. The findings provide new information about the link between care-giving and infant responses and how caregivers can better interact with preterm infants during a very sensitive period of brain development. Relevance to clinical practice. How nurses take care of the preterm infants influences their responses to care-giving stimuli. To interact better with the infant during care-giving procedures, nurses need to provide more supportive care-giving behaviours especially ‘position support’ and ‘containment’ based on the infant’s needs, and avoid care-giving that may be too rough and occur too quickly without attending the baby’s stressful signals, positioning the baby in hyperextension posture, or chatting with other people during procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The outcome of postoperative high- and intermediate-risk oral cavity cancer (OCC) patients receiving helical tomotherapy (HT) remains limited. Materials and methods: Between November 2006 and November 2012, 53 postoperative high- and intermediate-risk OCC patients treated with HT were enrolled. Results: The 4-year locoregional, local, and regional control rates were 66%, 76.4%, and 94.3%, respectively. The 4-year locoregional control rates of oral tongue and buccal mucosa cancer were 88.3% and 37.1%, respectively (P=0.012). Eleven (20.8%) patients experienced locoregional failure. In-field failure occurred in six of 53 (11.3%) in the primary area and three of 53 (5.7%) in the regional lymph-node area. No marginal failure was noted. Two of 53 (3.8%) experienced out-of-field failure. The rates of grade 3 dermatitis, mucositis, and dysphagia were 11%, 34%, and 13%, respectively. No grade 3 xerostomia was noted. Grade 2 xerostomia was 33% at month 6 and declined to 0 at month 48. A rate of 56% of grade 2 trismus at month 6 was noted, and declined to around 30% after 2 years. No grade 3 trismus was noted after 2 years. Conclusion: HT as a postoperative modality provided satisfying results, especially for xerostomia and trismus, and was impressive in high- and intermediate-risk OCC patients receiving postoperative HT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Microarray technology shows great potential but previous studies were limited by small number of samples in the colorectal cancer (CRC) research. The aims of this study are to investigate gene expression profile of CRCs by pooling cDNA microarrays using PAM, ANN, and decision trees (CART and C5.0). Methods. Pooled 16 datasets contained 88 normal mucosal tissues and 1186 CRCs. PAM was performed to identify significant expressed genes in CRCs and models of PAM, ANN, CART, and C5.0 were constructed for screening candidate genes via ranking gene order of significances. Results. The first screening identified 55 genes. The test accuracy of each model was over 0.97 averagely. Less than eight genes achieve excellent classification accuracy. Combining the results of four models, we found the top eight differential genes in CRCs; suppressor genes, CA7, SPIB, GUCA2B, AQP8, IL6R and CWH43; oncogenes, SPP1 and TCN1. Genes of higher significances showed lower variation in rank ordering by different methods. Conclusion. We adopted a two-tier genetic screen, which not only reduced the number of candidate genes but also yielded good accuracy (nearly 100%). This method can be applied to future studies. Among the top eight genes, CA7, TCN1, and CWH43 have not been reported to be related to CRC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]