Survival benefit of stereotactic radiosurgery for metastatic brain tumors in patients with controlled primary lesions and no other distant metastases.

The prognosis of patients with metastatic brain tumors has been very poor so far because most patients with metastatic brain tumors had other metastatic lesions and/or active primary lesions. Moreover, if no active lesions existed, local control of conventional radiation therapy was not so good, which also led to the poor prognosis. Thus, we conducted the current study concerning whether survival benefit existed in patients with controlled primary lesions and no other distant metastases, who were treated with stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), a superior method for local control, for metastatic brain tumors.

Head-to-head juxtaposition of Fas-associated phosphatase-1 (FAP-1) and c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase 3 (JNK3) genes: genomic structure and seven polymorphisms of the FAP-1 gene.

When characterizing the 5' flanking region of the c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase 3 ( JNK3) gene at 4q21-22, where frequent allelic losses and loss of expression had been detected in patients with brain tumors and hepatocellular carcinomas, we discovered that the Fas-associated phosphatase-1 ( FAP-1) gene was located only 633 bp upstream from JNK3 in a head-to-head orientation. A short G/C-rich region between the cap sites of the two genes suggested that they might share a bidirectional promoter region that appeared to contain multiple cis elements, including Sp1, AP-1, AP-2, GATA-1, a GC box, and a CCAAT box. The FAP-1 gene, consisting of 48 exons, initiates transcription within exon 2 and terminates in exon 48.