Chest
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Glucose-regulated protein 78 (GRP78) is involved in not only the progression of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) but also chemotherapeutic effects. We hypothesized that an intronic polymorphism (rs430397G>A) in GRP78 affects survival among patients with NSCLC treated with platinum-based chemotherapy. ⋯ The rs430397 AA genotype of GRP78 is associated with reduced survival and higher prevalence of early relapses in patients with advanced NSCLC treated with platinum-based chemotherapy.
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Before the oral arguments in late March, the vast majority of legal scholars felt confident that the Supreme Court of the United States would uphold the individual mandate against the constitutional challenge that 26 states have levied against it. Since the oral arguments, that confidence has been severely shaken. ⋯ The article posits that certain fundamental characteristics of health insurance, particularly its unusual role in steering health-care consumption decisions, which distinguishes health insurance from standard kinds of indemnity insurance, should make the constitutional question easy, but the Obama Administration's legal team was understandably hesitant to highlight those unique characteristics in its arguments. Because the Supreme Court justices seemed not to understand the uniqueness of health insurance without the government's help and because the justices seemed unusually willing to adopt a new constitutional constraint in this case, the individual mandate appears to be in far greater jeopardy than we legal scholars anticipated.
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A lower (more caudal) position of the larynx may result in a longer collapsible segment of the upper airway. One could thus hypothesize that the lower the larynx the greater the risk for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). To test this hypothesis, we measured the upper airway length to the level of the vocal cord and the horizontal and vertical segments of the supralaryngeal vocal cord tract (SVT) using multislice CT scan in Japanese patients with OSA. ⋯ The laryngeal position is lower in men than women. Aging is associated with a lower laryngeal position, and a longer ALVC is independently associated with OSA severity in Japanese patients. We conclude that both laryngeal descent and BMI may be risk factors for OSA.