Comparing Laparoscopic Elective Sigmoid Resection With Conservative Treatment in Improving Quality of Life of Patients With Diverticulitis: The Laparoscopic Elective Sigmoid Resection Following Diverticulitis (LASER) Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Diverticulitis has a tendency to recur and affect quality of life.

Objective: To assess whether sigmoid resection is superior to conservative treatment in improving quality of life of patients with recurrent, complicated, or persistent painful diverticulitis.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This open-label randomized clinical trial assessed for eligibility 128 patients with recurrent, complicated, or persistent painful diverticulitis in 6 Finnish hospitals from September 29, 2014, to October 10, 2018.

Increased C-reactive protein implies a poorer stage-specific prognosis in colon cancer.

Background: To characterize the stage-specific prognostic relevance of preoperative systemic inflammatory response, defined by C-reactive protein (CRP), in colon cancer (CC) patients.

Material And Methods: Data from CC patients operated on from 1998 to 2007 at three hospitals from three different Nordic countries were collected retrospectively from national registries, local databases and/or patient records. Patients with emergency surgery, infection or auto-immune disease were excluded.

Disparate roles of ATR and ATM in immunoglobulin class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.

Class switch recombination (CSR) and somatic hypermutation (SHM) are mechanistically related processes initiated by activation-induced cytidine deaminase. Here, we have studied the role of ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3-related protein (ATR) in CSR by analyzing the recombinational junctions, resulting from in vivo switching, in cells from patients with mutations in the ATR gene. The proportion of cells that have switched to immunoglobulin (Ig)A and IgG in the peripheral blood seems to be normal in ATR-deficient (ATRD) patients and the recombined S regions show a normal "blunt end-joining," but impaired end joining with partially complementary (1-3 bp) DNA ends.

Impact of DNA ligase IV on nonhomologous end joining pathways during class switch recombination in human cells.

Class switch recombination (CSR) is a region-specific, transcriptionally regulated, nonhomologous recombinational process that is initiated by activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID). The initial lesions in the switch (S) regions are subsequently processed and resolved, leading to recombination of the two targeted S regions. The mechanisms by which repair and ligation of the broken DNA ends occurs is still elusive.

Delineation of the role of the Mre11 complex in class switch recombination.

Class switch recombination (CSR) is a region-specific, transcriptionally regulated, nonhomologous recombinational process that is initiated by activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID). The initial lesions in the switch (S) regions are processed and resolved, leading to a recombination of the two S regions involved. The mechanism involved in the repair and ligation of the broken DNA ends is however still unclear.

Alternative end joining during switch recombination in patients with ataxia-telangiectasia.

Ataxia-Telangiectasia (A-T) and Nijmegen breakage syndrome (NBS) are recessive genetic diseases with similar cellular phenotypes that are caused by mutations in the recently described ATM (encoding ATM) and NBS1 (encoding p95) genes, respectively. Both disorders are accompanied by immunodeficiency in a majority of patients, but the mechanism involved has as yet not been established. We demonstrate that in cells from A-T patients, the switch (S) recombination junctions are aberrant and characterized by a strong dependence on short sequence homologies and devoid of normally occurring mutations around the breakpoint.