Summary:Age is one of the most important prognostic factors in nonHodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). 1 It has been demonstrated that elderly patients have a lower complete remission (CR) Intensive chemotherapy with autologous bone marrow transplantation is now considered the treatment of rate and a shorter survival because of reduced dosage of active drugs and increased toxicity from chemotherapy. 2 In choice for young patients with sensitive relapse of nonHodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) but results of this prospite of an anthracycline-containing regimen, some patients failed to respond or experienced a recurrence. [3][4][5] In younger cedure in older patients remain unknown. We evaluated the feasibility of two cycles of salvage therapy followed patients with sensitive relapse, myeloablative chemotherapy followed by stem cell transplantation is currently the by an autologous peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) transplantation in 13 patients aged more than 60 years method of choice to achieve long-term survival. 6 In order to evaluate the feasibility of this intensive pro-(median age: 62; range 61-72) suffering from relapsed (n = 10) or refractory (n = 3) aggressive NHL. All cedure in elderly patients, we investigated 13 patients aged more than 60 years with relapsed or refractory aggressive patients had previously received first-line treatment containing doxorubicin. An association of ifosfamide, NHL. Salvage chemotherapy consisted of a combination of ifosfamide, VP16 and cytosine-arabinoside with or without VP16, cytosine-arabinoside with or without high-dose methotrexate was used as salvage and priming therapy high-dose methotrexate (IVAM or IVA) followed by PBSC collection prior to transplantation. 7 Patients with sensitive prior to collection of PBSC. All patients received G-CSF following salvage therapy. PBSC collection could be disease and a sufficient number of PBSC underwent transplantation after a BEAM conditioning regimen. performed in 10 patients and yielded a median number of CFU-GM: 98.4 × 10 4 /kg (range 68-369). Nine patients underwent a transplantation using BEAM conditioning regimen. The median time to granulocyte and platelet Materials and methods recovery was 13 days (range respectively: 9-25 and 9-16). One patient died from sepsis after transplantation.Patient characteristics The main adverse experience occurring after transplantation was a prolonged decline of performance status.Patients over 60 years of age with relapsing or refractory aggressive NHL were considered eligible to receive therapy Seven patients achieved a complete remission and one failed to respond. Three patients are still alive in CR.provided that they gave informed consent, had a performance status of 0, 1 or 2, and no severe organ impairment. We conclude that PBSC collection was possible in selected patients over 60 years of age with refractory or

All three regimens were highly active. The biweekly combination of CPT-11 and 5-FU/FA (arm B) was notable for its low incidence of grade 3/4 neutropenia. The incidence of grade 3/4 delayed diarrhea was equivalent for the three treatment arms.

Many applications and protocols are planned for the so-called Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Most of them are supposed to work in dynamic networks, such as the vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). However, designing and studying distributed applications and protocols in such networks is not easy. Analytical studies suffer from the lack of pertinent models. Simulations are often far from reality. Road experiments are generally limited, due to their complexity.In this paper, we present an environment that emulates the vehicular networks. It allows to reproduce road experiments without further developments of the studied prototypes. These protocols can be tested with more complex road traffic. The impact of the communication range and the dynamics of the network can be studied. Some comparisons with road tests and simulations show the advantage of such an emulation framework.

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We propose a group membership service for asynchronous wireless dynamic ad hoc networks. It maintains as long as possible the existing groups and ensures that the groups' diameters are always smaller than a constant, fixed according to applications requirements. The proposed protocol is self-stabilizing in a dynamic distributed system. Moreover, it ensures a continuity property, meaning that, while the system is converging, it does not run away, except if it is forced by a topology change.