Participating in some types of social activities may reduce mortality or cognitive function impairment in the elderly. However, different activities, gender roles and uneven opportunities for work and social group participation may affect the risk of these endpoints.

Patients with localized nasal NK/T-cell lymphomas were better managed with radiotherapy as front-line therapy. The advantage of radiotherapy persisted even as palliative therapy after chemotherapy.

The goal of this study was to explore the concepts of successful ageing held by elderly people in Taiwan. Data were obtained from the Successful Ageing of the Elderly in Taiwan survey of 2004. The sample was drawn from the population aged 65 or more years in one county in Taiwan by probability proportional-to-size sampling. The participants were asked: ‘What do you think are the essential components of an ideal and satisfactory life in old age?’ They were also asked to score the relative importance of 23 ‘successful ageing’ concepts. The replies to the initial open-ended question were grouped in six categories: physical health and independence, economic security, family and social support, engagement with life, spiritual well-being, and environment and social welfare policy. The most highly rated ‘successful ageing’ concepts were physical health, independence, living without chronic disease, living with family, and receiving emotional care. All the responses were subjected to a factor analysis, and five factors accounted for 58.7 per cent of the variance: family and social support, mastery over life, health, enjoyment of life, and autonomy. It is concluded that elderly people in Taiwan most value health and independence, and also place considerable importance on economic security and family support, which they see as inter-related. Many are also concerned about the social environment and social policy, indicating that their awareness of and participation in socio-political debates affects their quality of life.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) influence many biological processes, including cancer. They do so by posttranscriptionally repressing target mRNAs to which they have sequence complementarity. Although it has been postulated that miRNAs can regulate other miRNAs, this has never been shown experimentally to our knowledge. Here, we demonstrate that miR-107 negatively regulates the tumor suppressor miRNA let-7 via a direct interaction. miR-107 was found to be highly expressed in malignant tissue from patients with advanced breast cancer, and its expression was inversely correlated with let-7 expression in tumors and in cancer cell lines. Ectopic expression of miR-107 in human cancer cell lines led to destabilization of mature let-7, increased expression of let-7 targets, and increased malignant phenotypes. In contrast, depletion of endogenous miR-107 dramatically increased the stability of mature let-7 and led to downregulation of let-7 targets. Accordingly, miR-107 expression increased the tumorigenic and metastatic potential of a human breast cancer cell line in mice via inhibition of let-7 and upregulation of let-7 targets. By mutating individual sites within miR-107 and let-7, we found that miR-107 directly interacts with let-7 and that the internal loop of the let-7/miR-107 duplex is critical for repression of let-7 expression. Altogether, we have identified an oncogenic role for miR-107 and provide evidence of a transregulational interaction among miRNAs in human cancer development.

This study provides empirical findings of the heterogeneity of successful aging trajectories in multidimensional indicators.