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Summary Chemotherapeutic management of ovarian cancers is a difficult task as these neoplasms show significant differences in chemosensitivity, even

Age-related cognitive impairment and dementia are an increasing societal burden. Epidemiological studies indicate that lifestyle factors, e.g. physical, cognitive and social activities, correlate with reduced dementia risk; moreover, positive effects on cognition of physical/cognitive training have been found in cognitively unimpaired elders. Less is known about effectiveness and action mechanisms of physical/cognitive training in elders already suffering from Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), a population at high risk for dementia. We assessed in 113 MCI subjects aged 65–89 years, the efficacy of combined physical-cognitive training on cognitive decline, Gray Matter (GM) volume loss and Cerebral Blood Flow (CBF) in hippocampus and parahippocampal areas, and on brain-blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) activity elicited by a cognitive task, measured by ADAS-Cog scale, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) and fMRI, respectively, before and after 7 months of training vs. usual life. Cognitive status significantly decreased in MCI-no training and significantly increased in MCI-training subjects; training increased parahippocampal CBF, but no effect on GM volume loss was evident; BOLD activity increase, indicative of neural efficiency decline, was found only in MCI-no training subjects. These results show that a non pharmacological, multicomponent intervention improves cognitive status and indicators of brain health in MCI subjects.

This study investigates the mdm2 gene status and expression in 66 surgically resected human breast carcinomas, with correlations with clinico-pathological and biological data (histological type, grading, steroid receptor status, p53 expression, proliferative activity). Four (7.7 per cent) out of 52 informative cases bear mdm2 gene amplification (four-to ten-fold) and 8 (15.4 per cent) of 52 cases showed borderline amplification (three-fold). Nine (13.6 per cent) out of 66 cases showed strong mdm2 nuclear immunoreactivity. Twenty-seven (40.9 per cent) cases showed isolated mdm2 reactive nuclei. All cases with clear amplification showed a high percentage of mdm2 immunoreactive nuclei. The relationship between gene amplification and mdm2 protein expression is highly significant (P < 0.0001). No association was observed between mdm2 gene amplification and any of the considered clinico-pathological and biological parameters, while mdm2 immunoreactivity showed a significant association only with oestrogen receptor immunoreactivity (P = 0.009). p53 expression was associated neither with mdm2 gene amplification nor with mdm2 immunoreactivity. It could be tempting to hypothesize that the evaluation of the combined mdm2/p53 immunohistochemical phenotype in human breast carcinoma could give us better prognostic information than the evaluation of the expression of the p53 protein alone.