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Dear Editor,Instead of antipsychological medicines for behavioral and psychological symptoms in dementia patients (BPSD), many other medicines 1,2 and care 3,4 have been investigated to effectively subside BPSD. Under the circumstance of an increasing number of self-caredependent older people, most of them suffering dementia, and a shortage of care workers, the optimal cost performance of care for both patients and care workers should be researched.Taking a bath is one of the favored cares for older patients. However, taking a bath is usually limited to once or twice a week because of a shortage of care workers. In Japan, a foot care custom has been performed since the Edo era to greet guests at inns. Foot care is easily performed without heavy burdens to both self-care-dependent older people and care workers as compared to taking a bath. In order to estimate the effectiveness of foot care for patients with BPSD, foot care was performed for patients with BPSD. Because used green tea is a useful tool for management of tinea manuun 5 and smell of contracted hand grip, 6 foot care combined with used green tea paste was adopted.Foot care was performed in the bathroom or at the bedside depending on the activities of daily living (ADL). Both legs and feet were dipped into hot water at 40-41°C in a plastic tub 40 cm wide, 30 cm deep and 10 L in volume for 10 min and the legs and feet were covered with green tea paste. The green tea paste was made from wasted green tea after commercial use in a green tea bottle in a tea company. The wasted green tea was dried and powdered and stocked in plastic bags. The wasted green tea was melted with hot water just before using as green tea paste. Five minutes later, foot massage was performed for 5 min. The green tea paste was rubbed on the legs and feet by massage. Finally, the green tea paste was washed out using fresh hot water and the legs and feet were wiped with a dry towel. Nails were in need of care. It takes approximately 30 min to perform foot care. The actual work time of the care worker was 15 min.We randomly assigned patients with BPSD into two groups using a random table. Patients suffering from a major medical illness such as neoplastic disease or acute inflammation were not involved in the present study. BPSD was assessed and evaluated using the Neuropsychiatiric Inventory (NPI). NPI consists of 10 items of behavioral disturbances and on each item severity (1 = mild, 2 = moderate, 3 = severe) and frequency (1 = occasionally, less than once per week; 2 = often, approximately once per week; 3 = frequently, several times per week but less than every day; 4 = very frequently, once or more per day or continuously) were rated. 7 NPI is calculated by the product of severity times frequency on each item and ranged 0-120 (lower scores indicate better performance). One group was treated with foot care (n = 10) and another group was not (n = 12). All patients were recruited from the long-term care Sendai Tomizawa Hospital, Sendai, Japan. The diagnosis of dementia was made accord...

Capecitabine (N4-pentyloxycarbonyl-5'-deoxy-5-fluorocytidine) is a novel fluoropyrimidine carbamate that was synthesized for the purpose of finding antitumor drugs with improved safety and efficacy profiles compared with those of 5-fluorouracil (5-FUra) and doxifluridine (5'-deoxy-5-fluorouridine, 5'-dFUrd). The present study compared the antitumor activities of the compound with those of other fluoropyrimidines in 12 human cancer xenograft models and their antimetastatic activities in murine tumor models. The antitumor efficacy of capecitabine was greater than those of 5'-dFUrd, UFT (a mixture of tegafur and uracil) and 5-FUra. Capecitabine was also much safer, particularly much less toxic to the intestinal tract, than the other compounds, indicating higher therapeutic indices. The therapeutic indices of capecitabine, 5'-dFUrd and 5-FUra were >40, >20 and 2.0 against the human CXF280 colon cancer xenograft, the most sensitive line to the fluoropyrimidines so far tested, and 5.1, 1.5, and <1.5 against the human HCT116 colon cancer xenograft with ordinary sensitivity, respectively. In addition, capecitabine, as well as 5'-dFUrd, selectively suppressed the spontaneous metastasis of mouse Lewis lung carcinoma in mice at extremely low doses, 32-64 fold lower than their minimum effective dose (MED) against the primary tumor growth. Capecitabine was even more antimetastatic than 5'-dFUrd. These results indicate that capecitabine has high therapeutic potential.