Acute inpatient rehabilitation of 55 patients after liver transplantation.

Objective: Acute rehabilitation for patients who have had liver transplants is often necessary to restore functional mobility, but no studies, except for case reports, have documented the complications, outcomes, or predictors of success of an acute inpatient rehabilitation program. Our objective was to examine each of these areas related to rehabilitation after liver transplantation.

Design: We performed a chart review of 55 patients who received a liver transplant and were treated on our acute rehabilitation service.

Relationship of hypertension to socioeconomic status in a west African population.

Objectives: To determine whether hypertension rates were positively related to socioeconomic status (SES) in males in urban northern Nigerian civil servants in order to confirm this relationship previously observed in a southern Nigerian civil servant population which differed in tribal origin, religious practices and diet.

Methods: Civil servants were recruited from the Sokoto State ministries, Sokoto, Nigeria. Professionals and administrators were designated as higher SES, and clerks and laborers as lower SES.

Local IL-4 delivery enhances immune reactivity to murine tumors: gene therapy in combination with IL-2.

Tumor cells transduced with the IL-4 gene demonstrate reduction of growth associated with macrophage and eosinophilic infiltrates, generation of cytotoxic T-cells, and protective immunity. Using murine IL-4 retroviral vectors, murine fibroblasts and tumors that produce from 50 to 5000 U of IL-4/10(6) cells per 24 hours as determined by ELISA and bioassay were successfully transduced. In blinded studies using C57BL/6 and BALB/c mice, we have shown that tumor growth can be inhibited (mean delay of 10 days compared with controls; P < .

Transfer and expression of the human interleukin-4 gene in carcinoma and stromal cell lines derived from lung cancer patients.

Introduction of the interleukin-4 (IL-4) gene into cells derived from human tumor tissue provides a means for generating a specific tumor vaccine. Such a vaccine could be produced by either transducing tumor-derived stromal cells with the IL-4 vector and coinjecting tumor cells, or by transducing the tumor cells themselves. We have developed a protocol for culturing cells from non-small cell lung tumors and routinely produce tumor cultures from 25% of tumors, and stromal cultures from > 80% of specimens.

Use of T-cell growth factors (interleukins 2, 4, 7, 10, and 12) in the evaluation of T-cell reactivity to melanoma.

Melanoma represents the single best example of a human tumor that has been shown to elicit specific T-cell reactivity. The responsiveness of some patients with metastatic melanoma to treatment with the prototypic T-cell growth factor (TCGF), interleukin-2 (IL-2), indicates that T cells play a role in antitumor immunity. Interleukin-4 (IL-4), another TCGF that has been administered clinically to humans, was not associated with tumor response in our trials conducted at the Surgery Branch of the National Cancer Institute.