Preparation and evaluation of paclitaxel-containing liposomes.

Paclitaxel, an antitumoral drug, is poorly soluble in aqueous media. Therefore, in a commercialised formulation (Taxol), paclitaxel (30 mg active compound) is dissolved in polyethoxylated castor oil (Cremophor EL) and ethanol. After dilution of Taxol in aqueous media paclitaxel tends to precipitate.

Coping and adapting to breast cancer: a six-month prospective study.

Aims: To compare ways of coping with breast cancer in acute and chronic periods and to approach their efficiency on psychological adaptation at each time.

Methods: Psychometric evaluation of 151 breast cancer women the day before surgery (T1), and of 107 of them 6 months later (T2), with self-rated questionnaires (CHIP Scale, HADS), "t Student" tests, correlation analyses and multiple regression analyses.

Results And Discussion: The coping scores during the chronic period are related to those observed during the acute period, with a decrease of instrumental strategies and a stability of distraction and palliative coping.

Text cohesion and metacomprehension: immediate and delayed judgments.

In three experiments, we examined comprehension judgments made after a piece of text had been read. We propose that such metacognitive judgments are based on the content of working memory at the exact moment of assessment. Generally speaking, this working metacognition hypothesis is in agreement with Koriat's cue utilization approach, which implies that different elements of information will be available (and used) depending on the moment at which a judgment is made.

The abstraction of a central tendency in amnesic patients.

Amnesic patients and control subjects were asked to reproduce arm movements of a given amplitude and to average amplitudes on series of three such movements. The error in averaging was found to be equal in patients and control subjects while reproduction performance was clearly affected by amnesia. The implications of these data for a theory of amnesia are briefly discussed.