To evaluate long-term effects of contractile and mitogenic stimuli on the contractile reactivity of arterial smooth muscle, we measured the incorporation of the thymidine analogue 5-bromo-2'-deoxyuridine (BrdUrd) and mechanical responses in arterial segments that had been maintained in tissue culture. The experiments were performed on renal arteries that had been isolated from adult rats, chemically sympathectomized, mechanically denuded from endothelium and mounted under distension. Exposure of arterial segments for up to 3 weeks to culture medium supplemented with fetal calf serum resulted in the following consecutive changes: a strong acute contraction, selective pharmacological changes that included decreased contractile responses to phenylephrine and vasopressin and increased relaxing responses to isoproterenol,

To treat cancer pain, physicians often decide to jump directly from step 1 of the World Health Organization (WHO) analgesic ladder to step 3. The use of transdermal fentanyl in patients with cancer pain who had either used no opioid before, or only codeine, is evaluated in the present trial. Both opioid-naive (N = 14) and codeine-using (N = 14) patients started with transdermal fentanyl in the lowest available delivery rate (25 microg/hr). Immediate-release oral morphine was present as "rescue" medication. Transdermal fentanyl provided good to excellent pain relief in the majority (68%) of these patients. During the study, 5 patients continued with 25 microg/hr, and the others used a higher dose. Clinically relevant respiratory depression was not observed. The common side effects of opioids were found; constipation was mentioned by 3 patients (11%). Transdermal fentanyl appeared a safe analgesic in these opioid-naive cancer pain patients. In this study, WHO step 2 could be skipped without untoward complications.

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Summary Replacement of enriched CMRL 1066 medium by cell-free ascites from tumour patients in the human tumour clonogenic assay described by Hamburger and Salmon (1977) increased plating efficiency for ovarian cancer cells by a median of 8-fold (range 0.4-1012 fold). In 40 experiments, two cases had a lower plating efficiency when cultured in cell-free ascites, 10 grew neither in standard medium nor in cell-free ascites and in two cases, growth was only observed in cell-free ascites. With standard medium, we observed 53% growth (>5 colonies/dish) and 41% evaluable for chemosensitivity testing (>30 colonies/dish). With cell-free ascites as culture medium, these figures were 71% and 63%, respectively. While under standard conditions the highest plating efficiency obtained was 0.25%, in 21% of the experiments done with cell-free ascites a plating efficiency higher than 1% was reached. We conclude that cell-free ascites is able to stimulate proliferation of ovarian cancer cells in agar and that the use of it extends the applicability of the clonogenic assay.

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