Search

Background: Communicating official public health information about infectious diseases is complicated by the fact that individuals receive much of their information from their social contacts, either via interpersonal interaction or social media, which can be prone to bias and misconception.Objective: This study aims to evaluate the effect of public health campaigns and the effect of socially communicated health information on learning about diseases simultaneously. Although extant literature addresses the effect of one source of information (official or social) or the other, it has not addressed the simultaneous interaction of official information (OI) and social information (SI) in an experimental setting.Methods: We used a series of experiments that exposed participants to both OI and structured SI about the symptoms and spread of hepatitis C over a series of 10 rounds of computer-based interactions. Participants were randomly assigned to receive a high, low, or control intensity of OI and to receive accurate or inaccurate SI about the disease.Results: A total of 195 participants consented to participate in the study. Of these respondents, 186 had complete responses across all ten experimental rounds, which corresponds to a 4.6% (9/195) nonresponse rate. The OI high intensity treatment increases learning over the control condition for all symptom and contagion questions when individuals have lower levels of baseline knowledge (all P values ≤.04). The accurate SI condition increased learning across experimental rounds over the inaccurate condition (all P values ≤.01). We find limited evidence of an interaction between official and SI about infectious diseases.Conclusions: This project demonstrates that exposure to official public health information increases individuals' knowledge of the spread and symptoms of a disease. Socially shared information also facilitates the learning of accurate and inaccurate information, though to a lesser extent than exposure to OI. Although the effect of OI persists, preliminary results suggest that it can be degraded by persistent contradictory SI over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Current first-line cisplatin-based combination chemotherapy regimens provide interesting response rates but limited impact on survival for patients with metastatic transitional cell carcinoma of the urothelium. Such results leave a significant patient population in need of salvage therapy., Patients and Methods: As the epidermal growth factor receptors 1 and 2 (EGFR and HER2) are frequently overexpressed in urothelial carcinoma, we explored the feasibility of a combination of paclitaxel (80 mg/m(2)/week) and lapatinib (1,500 mg orally daily) for six patients who were treated after failure of first-line platinum-based chemotherapy., Results: Only one out of six patients was able to receive the full doses during the first six weeks of treatment, while grade 2 or 3 diarrhea events required lapatinib dose reduction (one patient) or discontinuation (five patients), despite loperamide support., Conclusion: This combination is not recommended for this population of patients.

Purpose: To investigate a potential link between telomere length, chromosomal instability, and the advent of a second cancer (SC) in patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma (HL), who are known to be at risk for SCs. This study was premised on the finding that telomere dysfunction and DNA repair pathways were related to many pathologic conditions., Methods and Materials: Three cohorts of patients with HL were studied: 73 who were prospectively followed >5 years after diagnosis (prospective HL cohort), 28 who developed a SC (SC HL cohort), and 18 long-term survivors with no evidence of disease or complication since their initial treatment (NED HL cohort). Telomere length was analyzed by a telomeric restriction fragment assay in peripheral blood lymphocytes. Thirty healthy donors and 70 patients with a newly diagnosed solid tumor were the control population., Results: Compared with controls, patients from the prospective HL cohort, before any treatment, showed age-independent shorter telomeres (mean, 8.3 vs. 11.7 kb in healthy donors; <6 kb in 18% in HL patients), increased spontaneous chromosomal abnormalities, and increased in vitro radiation sensitivity (p < 10(-4) each). After treatment, telomere shortening was associated with cytogenetic profiles characterized by the persistence of complex chromosomal rearrangement and clonal aberrations. Moreover, the two cases of SC in the prospective HL patients had short telomeres and CCR initially. In addition, the SC HL cohort was characterized by markedly short telomeres (6.6 vs. 9.7 kb in the NED HL cohort), the presence of complex chromosome rearrangements, and increased in vitro radiation sensitivity., Conclusions: An intimate relationship between pre-treatment telomere shortening, chromosomal instability, radiation sensitivity and occurrence of SC was found in HL patients.