Antiangiogenesis mediates cisplatin-induced peripheral neuropathy: attenuation or reversal by local vascular endothelial growth factor gene therapy without augmenting tumor growth.

Background: Toxic neuropathies induced by cisplatin and other chemotherapeutic agents are important clinical problems because of their high incidence, their lack of effective treatment, and the fact that neuropathy represents a dose-limiting factor for these therapies. The pathogenic basis for toxic neuropathies induced by chemotherapeutic agents has not been completely elucidated.

Methods And Results: We investigated the hypothesis that experimental toxic neuropathy results from an antiangiogenic effect of these drugs, resulting in destruction of the vasa nervorum, and accordingly that the neuropathy could be prevented or reversed by locally administered VEGF gene transfer without augmenting tumor growth.

Prognostic limitations of the Daumas-Duport grading scheme in infratentorial neuroglial tumors in children.

The Daumas-Duport grading scheme (DDGS) utilizes four histologic features in an additive method (grade 1 if none present, grade 2 if only one is present, etc.). Its efficacy in achieving prognostically homogeneous groups of childhood infratentorial neuroglial tumors and its concordance with World Health Organization (WHO) diagnoses has not been evaluated.

Vasculitis of the spinal cord.

Background: Vasculitis of the central nervous system is rare but well described. It affects the cerebral hemispheres predominantly and only exceptionally involves the spinal cord.

Objective: To describe a case of spinal cord vasculitis with unusual pathologic changes.

Histopathologically proven poliomyelitis with quadriplegia and loss of brainstem function due to West Nile virus infection.

Recent electrophysiological and histopathological reports point to motor neurons in the anterior horn of the spinal cord and the brainstem as targets of severe West Nile virus (WNV) infection. We report histopathological confirmation of this poliomyelitis-like syndrome in a patient with WNV infection in Massachusetts.

Clinical and survival covariates of eight classes of childhood supratentorial neuroglial tumors.

Background: In the current study, the authors investigated clinical, surgical, and histologic characteristics (covariates) and their interactions in eight previously identified classes of childhood supratentorial neuroglial tumors. The classes resulted from 5 factor score profiles on 703 supratentorial neuroglial tumors in the Childhood Brain Tumor Consortium database.

Methods: The Cox proportional models were used to identify class survival covariates.