The current meta-analysis demonstrates that preoperative PNI is a prognostic marker in HCC.

upper tropospheric (UT) water vapor (H 2 O) and ice water content (IWC) from the Aura Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) and comparisons with outputs from the NASA Goddard Earth Observing System Version 5 (GEOS-5) data assimilation system. Both MLS and GEOS-5 show that high values of H 2 O and IWC at 215 to 147 hPa are associated with areas of deep convection. They exhibit good (within ∼15%) agreement in IWC at these altitudes, but GEOS-5 H 2 O is ∼50% (215 hPa) to ∼30% (147 hPa) larger than MLS values, possibly due to higher temperatures in the data assimilation system at these altitudes. A seasonally migrating band of tropical deep convection is clearly evident in both the MLS and GEOS-5 UT H 2 O and IWC, but GEOS-5 produces a weaker intertropical convergence zone than MLS. MLS and GEOS-5 both show spatial anticorrelation between IWC and H 2 O at 100 hPa, where low H 2 O is associated with low temperatures in regions of tropical convection. At 100 hPa, GEOS-5 produces 50% less IWC and 15% less H 2 O in the tropics, and ∼20% more H 2 O in the extratropics, than does MLS. Behavior of the 100 hPa H 2 O is consistent with it being controlled by temperature. The seasonal cycle in the vertical transport of tropical mean H 2 O from ∼147 hPa to ∼10 hPa appears much stronger in MLS than in GEOS-5. The UT IWC and H 2 O interannual variations, from both MLS and GEOS-5, show clear imprints of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation.

BackgroundRecent studies have showed that nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) could reduce the risk of several types of cancer. However, epidemiological evidence of the association between NSAIDs intake and the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains controversial.MethodsTo assess the preventive benefit of NSAIDs in HCC, we simultaneously searched the databases of PubMed, EmBase, Web of Science, and Scopus and screened eligible publications.ResultsA total of twelve articles (published from 2000 to 2017) from five countries were identified by retrieval. We observed a significantly lower risk of HCC incidence among users of NSAIDs than among those who did not use NSAIDs (pooled hazard ratio [HR] value =0.81, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.69–0.94). No evidence of publication bias was observed (Begg’s test, P=0.755; Egger’s test, P=0.564). However, when stratified according to the categories of NSAIDs, users of non-aspirin NSAIDs (HR =0.81, 95% CI: 0.70–0.94), but not aspirin (HR =0.77, 95% CI: 0.58–1.02), showed a statistically significant reduced HCC incidence. We also found that NSAIDs use significantly reduced the recurrent risk of HCC, with a HR value of 0.79 (95% CI: 0.75–0.84), whereas there was no statistically significant association between NSAIDs use and HCC mortality, with a HR value 0.65 (95% CI: 0.40–1.06).ConclusionTaken together, our meta-analysis demonstrates that NSAIDs significantly reduce the incident and recurrent risk of HCC.

Using the numerical cirrus cloud model developed in Part I of this study, the development of cirrus is examined for four different environmental regimes: warm unstable, cold unstable, warm stable, and cold stable. Despite similar initial saturation conditions, the clouds in the warm and cold cases develop very differently. As summarized below, these four simulations suggest that homogeneous freezing of haze particles and cold temperatures are two major reasons for persistent cirrus clouds. The numerical model is also used here to investigate the roles of several other physical factors in cirrus evolution for a selected environmental regime. These additional factors are radiation, ice crystal habit, latent heat, and ice crystal aggregation.In the warm unstable case, ice particles quickly grow large enough to fall out of the initially supersaturated cloud generation region into the subsaturated lower region. But in the cold unstable case, due to slow growth of cold temperatures, sedimentation is greatly postponed. Thus the cold cirrus tends to persist longer than the warm cirrus.In the unstable cases, diabatic heating tends to slightly destabilize the upper part of the cloud, whose circulation thus is most persistent near the cloud top. The circulation transports water vapor upward to enable long-lasting new ice particle generation.The solar heating tends to be concentrated near the cloud top in both unstable cases, but with quite different IR heating profiles. The IR heating warms the warm cloud near the base and cools it near the top, whereas the cold cloud is radiatively warmed throughout, mostly because it is optically thinner than the warm cloud.In the stable cases, homogeneous nucleation (the homogeneous freezing of haze solution droplets, as parameterized in Part I of this paper) does not occur for the parameterization of heterogeneous nucleation used, leaving the number concentration of ice much smaller than in the unstable cases. However, the individual crystals can grow larger, due to less competition for water vapor, so that they fall out of the initial saturated layer faster than in the unstable cases. The sedimentation rate is slower in the cold stable case than in the warm stable one, again due to slower growth rates at cold temperatures. In neither stable case does the induced diabatic heating destabilize the cloud layer.In this numerical study, it is found that cirrus cloud becomes much less persistent in the simulation without any radiative processes. For warm cirrus, the growth is slightly more vigorous in the daytime than at night, while the opposite is true for cold cirrus. It is found that latent heating plays two opposite roles in the evolution of cirrus. First, it augments the initial perturbation in the growing stage of the cloud, but then tends to stabilize the cloud layer, limiting the development of cirrus at later stages of the cloud evolution. Ice crystal habit has great impact on the evolution of cirrus, especially in an unstable atmosphere. The radiative heating rates are also found t...

The study purpose was to evaluate how much of the variance in quality of life (QOL) among Taiwanese patients with brain tumor could be accounted for by resilience and coping strategy. This cross-sectional study included 95 patients who had undergone a treatment of operations or chemotherapy or radiotherapy relevant to brain tumor after at least 1 month and completed the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer QOL Questionnaire-Brain Cancer Module (EORTC QLQ-BN20), Resilience Scale (RS), and Ways of Coping Checklist-Revised (WCC-R). There was a significant negative correlation between resilience and future uncertainty QOL and motor dysfunction QOL. In addition, there was a significant positive correlation between the emotion-focused coping and future uncertainty QOL, as well as a significant negative correlation between problem-focused coping and motor dysfunction QOL. Resilience accounted for 4.8% and the emotion-focused coping accounted for 10.20% of the variance in separately predicting the future uncertainty QOL. This study highlights the potential importance of resilience and coping strategies in patients' QOL, which is relevant to brain tumor treatment.