Even the overall incidence is decreasing and the proportion of early gastric cancer is increasing from the national mass screening program, still gastric cancer is the major issue in Korea. Multimodality approach and the development of novel therapeutic agents enabled us to improve the survival rate of gastric cancer. However, the proper treatment strategy for the subgroups of patients is necessary, which is now categorized based on the clinicopathologic parameters. We need more in-depth information regarding the molecular biology of gastric cancer, and the development of novel targeted biological agents and the biomarkers for the future. Currently, the recent chemotherapeutic agents showed the improved response in advanced gastric cancer. Hence, the basic concept of adjuvant chemotherapy, palliative chemotherapy, neoadjuvant treatment with or without incorporation of radiotherapy become settle down with more evidences from several phase III trials. Especially, after understanding the difference between Asia and Western countries including biology, ethnic difference, operation technology, and the treatment approaches, the qualified, well-designed multinational clinical trials are on-going. Based on the current results, here, I describe the current status of gastric cancer treatment strategy.
Asia ; Biological Agents ; Biomarkers ; Biology ; Chemotherapy, Adjuvant ; Humans ; Incidence ; Korea ; Mass Screening ; Molecular Biology ; Neoadjuvant Therapy ; Stomach Neoplasms ; Survival Rate

No abstract available.
Teratoma*

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the clinical effect of V-Y advancement flap after vulvectomy in patients with vulvar cancer. Local and systemic morbidity, the degree of satisfaction after operation, length of hospital stay were evaluated. PATIENTS AND METHODS: From March 2001 to september 2002, five patients with invasive vulvar cancer were eligible for this study. All the patients underwent radical vulvectomy with groin lymph nodes dissection. All of them were reconstructed by the same surgeon using ischial fasciocutaneous V-Y flaps based on perforators from the inferior border of the gluteous maximus muscle. RESULTS: Flap survival was 100%. There were no major complication including wound infection, wound disruption, urinary tract infection, and seroma in the femoral triangle. Functional outcome was excellent in all patients. CONCLUSION: The V-Y advancement flap provides a straight-forward and simple safe reliable method as a common approach in radical vulvectomy.
Groin ; Humans ; Length of Stay ; Lymph Nodes ; Seroma ; Urinary Tract Infections ; Vulvar Neoplasms* ; Wound Infection ; Wounds and Injuries

This report attempts to explain the (i) implications of comorbidity for research and practice in the fieldo of oncology, (ii) the approach for dosing of anti-cancer drugs in the presence of comorbidity, as an example of its clinical application, and finally (iii) the dosing guidelines for the anticancer drugs clinically active in gastric cancer in the presence of renal or liver dysfunction. This has resulted from the idea of approaching comorbidity in a systematic way and of integrating it with oncologic decisions. Various methods have been used to assess comorbidity. However, significant work remains to be done to analyze how various diseases combine to influence the oncologic outcome. The main end-point explored so far has been mortality, but a largely open challenge remains to correlate comorbidity with treatment tolerance and functional and quality of life, as well as to integrate it in clinical decision-making. Cancer chemotherapy in comorbidity should be considered as an example of the need for dose optimization in individual patients, and it should be determined by considering the basic principles of the pharmacokinetics and the pharmacodynamics of the agents. This review analyzes the available data on the pharmacokinetics and the toxicities of anti-cancer agents in the comorbidity population.
Comorbidity* ; Drug Therapy* ; Humans ; Liver Diseases ; Mortality ; Pharmacokinetics ; Quality of Life ; Stomach Neoplasms

PURPOSE: This study was performed to evaluate the contribution of appendiceal computed tomography (CT) in the more accurate diagnosis of acute appendicitis and decrease in the rate of negative appendectomies. METHODS: Between May and August 2005, 146 patients with right lower quadrant (RLQ) abdominal pain and tenderness were diagnosed using appendiceal CT. The appendiceal CT scans were performed with contrast media in the abdominal and pelvic areas. 7 mm slice scans were taken both before and after the contrast media injection, with a time delay. The control group was comprised of 99 patients, who were also checked by abdominal CT or ultrasonography, between December 2004 and April 2005, with the data analyzed retrospectively. RESULTS: In the study group, 85 of the 146 cases were diagnosed with acute appendicitis on appendiceal CT, and had undergone an appendectomy, including 42 men (mean age 39.9 yr) and 43 women (mean age 44.6 yr). The sensitivity and specificity of appendiceal CT in acute appendicitis were 95.3 and 98.4%, respectively. There were 4 (4.7%) negative appendectomy cases; 2 in men and 2 in women. The control group conprised of 47 men and 52 women. There were 13 (13.1%) negative appendectomy cases; 4 in men and 9 in women. CONCLUSION: The routine use of appendiceal CT, in patients with RLQ abdominal pain and tenderness, resulted in a significant decrease in the negative appendectomy rate.
Abdominal Pain ; Appendectomy ; Appendicitis* ; Contrast Media ; Diagnosis ; Female ; Humans ; Male ; Retrospective Studies ; Sensitivity and Specificity ; Tomography, X-Ray Computed ; Ultrasonography

In microarray technology, many diverse experimental features can cause biases including RNA sources, microarray production or different platforms, diverse sample processing and various experiment protocols. These systematic effects cause a substantial obstacle in the analysis of microarray data. When such data sets derived from different experimental processes were used, the analysis result was almost inconsistent and it is not reliable. Therefore, one of the most pressing challenges in the microarray field is how to combine data that comes from two different groups. As the novel trial to integrate two data sets with batch effect, we simply applied standardization to microarray data before the significant gene selection. In the gene selection step, we used new defined measure that considers the distance between a gene and an ideal gene as well as the between-slide and within-slide variations. Also we discussed the association of biological functions and different expression patterns in selected discriminative gene set. As a result, we could confirm that batch effect was minimized by standardization and the selected genes from the standardized data included various expression pattems and the significant biological functions.
Bias (Epidemiology) ; Computational Biology ; Dataset* ; Genes, vif ; RNA

BACKGROUND: It is controversial that an electrocardiography (EEG) is valuable in evaluation of patients with headache. The purpose of this study was to determine whether EEG brain mapping can be a useful indicator for evaluating the analgesic efficacy of treatment on the patient with an occipital headache. METHODS: We did an EEG on 20 patients with occipital headaches at the peri-laser application period. The laser was radiated for 3 minutes a third of the total distance from the external occipital protuberance to the mastoid process on the superior nuchal line. An EEG was taKen before laser radiation as control use, and at 10, 30 and 60 minutes after laser radiation by 32 channel electrodes (international 10 20 system). The EEG mapping was red for the high electric potential and blue for the low electric potential. RESULTS: Compared with control group, the alpha wave increased significantly in parieto-occipital and occipital region at 60 minutes after laser radiation (P < 0.05). DarK red color was increased especially in occipital region at 60 minutes after laser radiation, compared with EEG mapping before laser radiation. Good and Fair improvements were observed in 55% of the patients with occipital headaches. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that EEG can be a valuable indicator in the evaluation of analgesic efficacy of treatment in the patients suffering from occipital headaches. Pain scores were assessed by the patient with the visual analogue scale (VAS).
Brain Mapping ; Electrocardiography ; Electrodes ; Electroencephalography* ; Headache* ; Humans ; Mastoid

Malignant obstruction develops frequently in advanced gastric cancer. Although it is primarily the gastric outlet that is obstructed, there are occasional reports of colonic obstruction. Treating intestinal obstruction usually requires emergency surgery or stent insertion. There are several kinds of complications with stent insertion, such as bowel perforation, stent migration, bleeding, abdominal pain and reobstruction. Nevertheless, endoscopic stent insertion could be a better treatment than emergency surgery in cases of malignant bowel obstruction in cancer patients with poor performance status. We report a case of advanced gastric cancer with carcinomatosis in which a recurrent colonic stent was inserted at the same site because of cancer growth into the stent. The patient maintained a good condition for chemotherapy, thus improving their chances for survival.
Aged ; Female ; Humans ; Intestinal Obstruction/etiology/radiography/*surgery ; Neoplasm Recurrence, Local ; Prosthesis Implantation/*methods ; *Stents ; Stomach Neoplasms

Schwannoma is a common soft tissue tumor, but it appears to be rare among the spindle cell mesencymal tumors of the gastrointestinal tract. Gastrointestinal Schwannomas (GIS) are rare and most of them originate in the stomach or the small bowel. GIS of the colon is extremely rare. The most important issue to be addressed for this type of tumor is the difficulty in making the correct preoperative diagnosis. Less than 10% of cases have been diagnosed as schwannoma preoperatively. A 58-year-old man was found to have a 3.5cm sized submucosal transverse colon tumor on the preoperative colonoscopy, abdominal CT and MRI. Wedge resection was done and the submucosal mass was diagnosed as schwannoma on the immunochemical staining. The immunochemical results were negative staining for CD 117(KIT) and CD 34 and positive staining for S-100 protein, which is all consistent with schwannoma. We report here on the first case of colonic schwannoma in Korea, along with a review of the literature.
Colon* ; Colon, Transverse ; Colonoscopy ; Diagnosis ; Gastrointestinal Tract ; Humans ; Korea ; Magnetic Resonance Imaging ; Middle Aged ; Negative Staining ; Neurilemmoma* ; S100 Proteins ; Stomach ; Tomography, X-Ray Computed

After laparoscopic surgery, most cases of incisional hernia occur when a trocar greater than 10 mm is used and this rarely occurs when a 5 mm trocar is used. We recently experienced two cases of incisional herniation at a 5 mm port site in connection with withdrawal of the drain after laparoscopic procedure.
Hernia ; Laparoscopy ; Surgical Instruments