[The fourth report from Sapporo Tsukisamu Hospital - chemotherapy and its regimen as second choice for patients with early gastric cancer].

Surgical treatments for early gastric cancer, such as endoscopic procedures, are currently performed as standard therapy. However, when surgery is not possible due to physical or mental conditions, effective chemotherapy with minimum side effects is a second choice, although a suitable regimen has yet to be recommended. We thus retrospectively evaluated the Int FP regimen for 10 early gastric cancer patients.

[The third report from Sapporo Tsukisamu Hospital--chemotherapy for patients with advanced gastric cancer (peritoneal dissemination, peritonitis carcinomatosa)].

Recently, it became possible to reduce the size of tumors in patients with advanced or relapsed gastric cancer by chemotherapy with the combination of several kinds of anti-cancer drugs which are all effective and allowed for use with gastric cancer patients. However, chemotherapy alone can not cure patients with advanced gastric cancer that was shown to improve median survival time (MST), compared with patients provided with the best supportive care (BSC). According to reports from Europe, US and Japan,the MST of patients with advanced gastric cancer and those with peritoneal expansion treated by chemotherapy is almost 7-12 months and 5-6 months,respectively, both of which are short and unsatisfactory.

[The second report from Sapporo Tsukisamu hospital--chemotherapy for patients with advanced colorectal cancer].

The remedy,especially recent chemotherapy,against colorectal cancer is improving median survival time (MST) of patients with Stage IV advanced colorectal cancer. According to other reports,however,it seems to be difficult to improve it longer than 20 months. In May 2002, we devised a new regimen by intermittent dosage of 5-FU (-->S-1), CDDP and paclitaxel utilizing the difference of cell cycle between normal and cancer cells, and thirteen patients with advanced colorectal cancer (Stage IV) were treated with this regimen.

[The first report from Sapporo Tsukisamu Hospital--chemotherapy and chemoradiotherapy for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer].

The remedy, especially chemotherapy, for advanced pancreatic cancer is hardly ever successful in terms of efficacy rate and survival period, because it is virtually unable to contribute to the improvement of median survival time (MST). Thus,we devised a new intermittent dosage regimen utilizing the cell cycle difference of normal GI tract, bone marrow cell and pancreatic cancer cell, making use of 5-FU (-->S-1), CDDP and paclitaxel in March 2002. Ten patients with advanced pancreatic cancer (4 in Stage IVa and 6 in Stage IVb) were treated with this new regimen.

[Long-term repeatable chemotherapy for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer].

At present, the advanced pancreatic cancer is known to be one of the most resistant malignancies on chemotherapy. To improve the efficacy of chemotherapy, we shifted the aim of chemotherapy from a tumor regression to long-term survival, and sought for a repeatable regimen with little toxicity. Some of the novel (repeatable) regimens used a combination of 5-FU/S-1, CDDP and paclitaxel performed for 10 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer (4 cases of Stage IVa and 6 cases of Stage IVb).

Ethanol induces transforming growth factor-alpha expression in hepatocytes, leading to stimulation of collagen synthesis by hepatic stellate cells.

Background: Liver fibrosis often develops in alcoholic liver diseases without accompanying inflammation; however, the underlying mechanism is unclear. Using ethanol-exposed human HepG2 hepatoblastoma cells as a model for alcoholic liver diseases, we previously found that ethanol exposure causes HepG2 cells to secrete an approximately 6,000 Da nonheparin-binding polypeptide that stimulates collagen synthesis in human IMR-90 fibroblasts. The aim of the current study was to characterize and identify this factor.