Background
Recent studies have suggested that sarcopenia is a prognostic risk indicator of postoperative complications and predicts survival in cancer patients. The aim of this study is to ...investigate whether sarcopenia is associated with postoperative short-term outcome (morbidity and mortality) and long-term survival in patients undergoing esophagectomy for cancer after neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy.
Methods
All patients who underwent neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy followed by esophagectomy for cancer, and of whom an adequate CT scan was available, were included in the current study. The presence of sarcopenia was defined by CT imaging using cut-off values of the total cross-sectional muscle tissue measured transversely at the third lumbar level.
Results
A total number of 120 patients were eligible for analysis. Almost half of the patients (
N
= 54, 45 %) were classified as having sarcopenia; 24 sarcopenic patients (44 %) had overweight and 5 sarcopenic patients (9 %) were obese. Overall morbidity and mortality rate did not differ significantly between sarcopenic and non-sarcopenic patients, nor did long-term overall or disease-free survival. Also sarcopenic obesity was not associated with worse outcome.
Conclusion
The presence of sarcopenia was not associated with a negative short- and long-term outcome in this selected group of esophageal cancer patients after neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy followed by esophagectomy.
The Credit Ratings Game BOLTON, PATRICK; FREIXAS, XAVIER; SHAPIRO, JOEL
The Journal of finance (New York),
February 2012, Letnik:
67, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The collapse of AAA-rated structured finance products in 2007 to 2008 has brought renewed attention to conflicts of interest in credit rating agencies (CRAs). We model competition among CRAs with ...three sources of conflicts: (1) CRAs conflict of understating risk to attract business, (2) issuers' ability to purchase only the most favorable ratings, and (3) the trusting nature of some investor clienteles. These conflicts create two distortions. First, competition can reduce efficiency, as it facilitates ratings shopping. Second, ratings are more likely to be inflated during booms and when investors are more trusting. We also discuss efficiency-enhancing regulatory interventions.
Stress Testing and Bank Lending Shapiro, Joel; Zeng, Jing
Review of financial studies/The Review of financial studies,
04/2024, Letnik:
37, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Abstract Stress tests convey information about the strictness of future tests, creating incentives for banks to alter their future lending behavior. Regulators recognize and use this influence: they ...may conduct softer stress tests to encourage lending or tougher stress tests to reduce risk-taking. This information management can lead to inefficiencies when (a) the test loses credibility or (b) the test becomes self-fulfilling. In addition, banks may distort their lending behavior in anticipation of the stress test design, leading to further surplus losses. The analysis applies to banking supervision and regulation more broadly.
Credit rating agencies (CRAs) have long held that reputational concerns discipline their behavior. The value of reputation, however, depends on economic fundamentals that vary over the business ...cycle. In a model of ratings incorporating endogenous reputation and a market environment that varies, we find that ratings quality is countercyclical. Specifically, a CRA is more likely to issue less-accurate ratings when fee-income is high, competition in the labor market for analysts is tough, and securities' default probabilities are low. Persistence in economic conditions can diminish our results, while mean reversion exacerbates them. The presence of naive investors reduces overall quality, but quality remains countercyclical. Finally, we demonstrate that competition among CRAs yields similar results.
A regulator resolving a bank faces two audiences: depositors, who may run if they believe the regulator will not provide capital, and banks, which may take excess risk if they believe the regulator ...will provide capital. When the regulator's cost of injecting capital is private information, it manages expectations by using costly signals: (1) a regulator with a low cost of injecting capital may forbear on bad banks to signal toughness and reduce risk taking, and (2) a regulator with a high cost of injecting capital may bail out bad banks to increase confidence and prevent runs.
Pain arises from activation of peripheral nociceptors, and strong noxious stimuli may cause an increase in spinal excitability called central sensitization, which is likely involved in many ...pathological pain states. So far, it has not been achieved to simultaneously visualize in vivo both the temporal and spatial aspects of spinal activity, including central sensitization. Using autofluorescent flavoprotein imaging (AFI), an optical technique suitable for mapping activity in nervous tissue, we demonstrate a close temporal and spatial correlation of electrically evoked nociceptive input with the spinal AFI signal, representing spinal neuronal activity. The AFI signal increases linearly with stimulation intensity. Furthermore, we found that the AFI signal was much larger in intensity and size when the same electrical stimulation was applied after the induction of central sensitization by a subcutaneous capsaicin injection. Finally, innocuous palpation of the hindpaw did not evoke an AFI response in naive animals, but after capsaicin injection a strong response was obtained. This is the first report demonstrating simultaneously the temporal and spatial propagation of spinal nociceptive activity in vivo.
Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), the most common type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, remains a partially curable disease. Genetic alterations affecting components of NF-κB signaling pathways occur ...frequently in DLBCL. Almost all activated B cell–like (ABC) DLBCL, which is the least curable group among the 3 major subtypes of this malignancy, and a substantial fraction of germinal center B cell–like (GCB) DLBCL exhibit constitutive NF-κB pathway activity. It has been demonstrated that ABC-DLBCL cells require such activity for proliferation and survival. Therefore, inhibition of NF-κB activation in DLBCL may provide an efficient and targeted therapy. In screening for small-molecule compounds that may inhibit NF-κB activation in DLBCL cells, we identified a compound, NSC697923, which inhibits the activity of the ubiquitin-conjugating (E2) enzyme Ubc13-Uev1A. NSC697923 impedes the formation of the Ubc13 and ubiquitin thioester conjugate and suppresses constitutive NF-κB activity in ABC-DLBCL cells. Importantly, NSC697923 inhibits the proliferation and survival of ABC-DLBCL cells and GCB-DLBCL cells, suggesting the Ubc13-Uev1A may be crucial for DLBCL growth. Consistently, knockdown of Ubc13 expression also inhibited DLBCL cell survival. The results of the present study indicate that Ubc13-Uev1A may represent a potential therapeutic target in DLBCL. In addition, compound NSC697923 may be exploited for the development of DLBCL therapeutic agents.
In some markets sellers have better information than buyers over which products best serve a buyer's needs. Depending on the market structure, this may lead to conflicts of interest in the provision ...of information by sellers. This paper studies this issue in the market for financial services. The analysis presents a new model of competition between banks, where price competition influences the ensuing incentives for truthful information revelation. We also compare conflicts of interest in two different firm structures, specialized banking and one-stop banking.
The cerebellar cortex is crucial for sensorimotor integration. Sensorimotor inputs converge on cerebellar Purkinje cells via two afferent pathways: the climbing fibre pathway triggering complex ...spikes, and the mossy fibre–parallel fibre pathway, modulating the simple spike activities of Purkinje cells. We used, for the first time, the mouse whisker system as a model system to study the encoding of somatosensory input by Purkinje cells. We show that most Purkinje cells in ipsilateral crus 1 and crus 2 of awake mice respond to whisker stimulation with complex spike and/or simple spike responses. Single‐whisker stimulation in anaesthetised mice revealed that the receptive fields of complex spike and simple spike responses were strikingly different. Complex spike responses, which proved to be sensitive to the amplitude, speed and direction of whisker movement, were evoked by only one or a few whiskers. Simple spike responses, which were not affected by the direction of movement, could be evoked by many individual whiskers. The receptive fields of Purkinje cells were largely intermingled, and we suggest that this facilitates the rapid integration of sensory inputs from different sources. Furthermore, we describe that individual Purkinje cells, at least under anaesthesia, may be bound in two functional ensembles based on the receptive fields and the synchrony of the complex spike and simple spike responses. The ‘complex spike ensembles’ were oriented in the sagittal plane, following the anatomical organization of the climbing fibres, while the ‘simple spike ensembles’ were oriented in the transversal plane, as are the beams of parallel fibres.
The rodent whisker system, combining simple movements with prompt sensory feedback, is generally considered as a model system to study integration of sensory and motor information. Although the cerebellum is critically important for this ‘sensorimotor integration’, hardly any functional data on its whisker representation is available. We show that Purkinje cells, which form the sole output of the cerebellar cortex, cooperate in functional groups to encode the amplitude, speed and direction of mechanical whisker stimulations. The two nervous pathways conveying input to the cerebellar cortex, the mossy fibre and the climbing fibre pathway, mediate different aspects of sensory input. Specifically, mossy fibre inputs convey information from multiple whiskers and are insensitive to the direction of whisker movement, while climbing fibres encode in a direction‐specific way the movement of a single whisker. Thus, this study contributes to our understanding of how sensory input is distributed over and encoded by the cerebellar cortex.
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