Patients with MSCC from pulmonary and renal cancers experienced improved survival in the study period. No improvement was seen for patients with other oncological diagnoses. This corresponds to reports from oncological studies and could affect preoperative scoring systems.

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The anatomy and physiology of the non-image forming visual system was investigated in a visually blind cone-rod homeobox gene (Crx) knock-out mouse (Crx−/−), which lacks the outer segments of the photoreceptors. We show that the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) in the Crx−/−mouse exhibit morphology as in the wild type mouse. In addition, the SCN contain vasoactive intestinal peptide-, vasopressin-, and gastrin-releasing peptide-immunoreactive neurons as present in the wild type. Anterograde in vivo tracings from the retina of the Crx−/− and wild type mouse showed that the retinohypothalamic projection to the SCN and the central optic pathways were similar in both animals. Telemetric monitoring of the running activity and temperature revealed that both the Crx−/−and wild type mouse exhibited diurnal rhythms with a 24-h period, which could be phase changed by light. However, power spectral analysis revealed that both rhythms in the Crx−/− mouse were less robust than those in the wild type. The normal development of the SCN and the central visual pathways in the Crx−/− mouse suggests that a modulatory input from the photoreceptors in the peripheral retina to the retinal melanopsin neurons or the SCN may be necessary for a normal function of the non-image forming system of the mouse. However, a change in the SCN of the Crx−/− mouse might also explain the observed circadian differences between the knock out mouse and wild type mouse.

Background Antitachycardia pacing (ATP) is an effective treatment for ventricular tachycardia (VT). We evaluated the efficacy of different ATP programs based on a large remote monitoring data set from patients with implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs). Methods A dataset from 18,679 ICD patients was used to evaluate the first delivered ATP treatment. We considered all device programs that were used for at least 50 patients, leaving us with 7 different programs and a total of 32,045 episodes. We used the two-proportions z-test (α = 0.01) to compare the probability of success and the probability for acceleration in each group with the corresponding values of the default setting. Results Overall, the first ATP treatment terminated in 78.4%–97.5% of episodes with slow VT and 81.5%–91.1% of episodes with fast VT. The default setting of the ATP programs with the number of sequences S = 3 was applied to treat 30.1% of the slow and 36.6% of the fast episodes. Reducing the maximum number of sequences to S = 2 decreased the success rate for slow VT ( P < 0.0001, h = 0.38), while the setting S = 4 resulted in the highest success rate of 97.5% ( P < 0 . 0001 , h = 0.27). Conclusion While the default programs performed well, we found that increasing the number of sequences from 3 to 4 was a promising option to improve the overall ATP performance.