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Michelle Zhou, Marko Popovic, Mark Pasetka, Natalie Pulenzas, Soha Ahrari, Edward Chow, Carlo DeAngelis Department of Pharmacy, Odette Cancer Center, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Purpose: Nausea and vomiting are major adverse effects of chemotherapy and can greatly impact patients’ quality of life. Although chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting (CINV) prevalence is high, treatment remains difficult. Palonosetron is a 5-hydroxytryptamine receptor antagonist (5-HT3RA) approved for treatment of CINV. The purpose of this review is to discuss existing and emerging therapeutic options, and examine studies focusing on palonosetron with regards to efficacy, pharmacology, tolerability, safety, and patient-derived outcomes.Methods: A literature search was conducted using Ovid MEDLINE and EMBASE to identify relevant studies using palonosetron alone or in combination with other antiemetics. Studies were extracted if they included complete response (CR), complete control (CC), no nausea, no vomiting, and no rescue medications as an endpoint. Studies were also included if safety endpoints were examined.Results: Palonosetron alone has been shown to improve CR and CC rates for patients receiving low, moderate, or high emetogenic chemotherapy. Rates were further improved with the addition of dexamethasone, a corticosteroid. Furthermore, the addition of neurokinin-1 receptor antagonists, such as netupitant markedly improved efficacy profiles compared to palonosetron alone. Aprepitant is an antiemetic that has exhibited positive results in combination with palonosetron. Recently, a new drug consisting of netupitant and palonosetron (NEPA) has demonstrated significantly more efficacious prevention of CINV. Regardless of the combination, palonosetron has been well tolerated. The most common adverse events were constipation, headache, fatigue, and dizziness, with the majority of patients describing them as only mild or moderate.Conclusion: Palonosetron, alone or with other antiemetics, has improved CINV treatment due to its ability to significantly reduce delayed phases of CINV, compared to similar 5-HT3RAs. Palonosetron is both more effective than first generation 5-HT3RAs and safer, as it results in a smaller prolongation of the QTc interval, compared to other 5-HT3RAs. Keywords: chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, palonosetron, efficacy, safety, pharmacology, patient-reported outcomes

The model of a photoacoustic gas-microphone signal in the time domain recorded in a transmission configuration using a minimum volume cell is derived. This model takes into account the inertial thermal relaxations of both the sample and the gas filling the cell by means of the generalized hyperbolic theory of heat conduction. With the introduction of electro-thermal analogy for the thin sample and short microphone length cavity, characteristic quantities are defined, which can be used in solving the inverse problem in time-domain photoacoustic in both cases, when thermal relaxations are neglected as well as when they are considered. The derived model that includes thermal relaxation explains the experimentally observed occurrence of overshoots and undershoots as well as an oscillatory approach to the steady values of the recorded signal in high-resolution time-domain photoacoustic measurements of thin semiconductor membranes, which will be presented in detail in Paper II of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to make the photothermal effect detectable from a sample with low optical absorption, an optically opaque layer must be applied on its surface. A model of optically induced temperature variations for such a structure is derived, with a very thin coating applied on the non-illuminated (back) side of the sample and neglecting heat flux dissipation in the coating. Validation of the model is performed by comparing the obtained results with the results for the corresponding two-layer structure model. The influence of optical absorption on surface temperature variations of both optically transparent and semi-transparent film, whether the film is a good or poor thermal conductor, is analyzed. It is shown that the effects of optical absorption in the coated structure can be observed through variations in the measured temperature, despite the low absorbance of the sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thermodynamics is a vast area of knowledge with a debatable role in explaining the evolution of ecosystems. In the case of soil ecosystems, this role is still unclear due to difficulties in determining the thermodynamic functions that are involved in the survival and evolution of soils as living systems. The existing knowledge is largely based on theoretical approaches and has never been applied to soils using thermodynamic functions that have been experimentally determined. In this study, we present a method for the complete experimental thermodynamic characterization of soil organic matter. This method quantifies all the thermodynamic functions for combustion and formation reactions which are involved in the thermodynamic principles governing the evolution of the universe. We applied them to track the progress of soil organic matter with soil depth in mature beech forests. Our results show that soil organic matter evolves to a higher degree of reduction as it is mineralized, yielding products with lower carbon but higher energy content than the original organic matter used as reference. These products have higher entropy than the original one, demonstrating how the soil ecosystem evolves with depth, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. The results were sensitive to soil organic matter transformation in forests under different management, indicating potential applicability in elucidating the energy strategies for evolution and survival of soil systems as well as in settling their evolutionary states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a self-consistent inverse procedure is developed for the estimation of linear thermal expansion coefficient and thermal diffusivity of solids from transmission photoacoustic measurement. This procedure consists of two single-parameter fitting processes applied alternately: phase data are fitted by shifting thermal diffusion coefficient, while amplitude data are fitted by shifting thermal expansion coefficient. Each fitting process uses the resulting parameter of the other, previously finished one, thus converging to the best solution-pair achievable. In numerical experiments, the convergence proves to be very fast. The achieved parameter estimation error is as low as 1%, and it can be lowered further more by increasing the fitting resolution in parameter space. The application of the procedure on experimentally obtained aluminum photoacoustic response (measurements) on three thickness levels returns the estimates of its thermal diffusion and thermal expansion coefficients within expected literature boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]