WITHDRAWN: Oral steroids for nasal polyps.

Review withdrawn from Issue 4, 2016. Replaced by new reviews 'Short‐course oral steroids alone for chronic rhinosinusitis' (Head 2016a) and 'Short‐course oral steroids as an adjunct therapy for chronic rhinosinusitis' (Head 2016b). The editorial group responsible for this previously published document have withdrawn it from publication.

Prospective technical validation and assessment of intra-tumour heterogeneity of a low density array hypoxia gene profile in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

Background And Purpose: Tumour hypoxia is associated with a poor prognosis in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), however there is no accepted method for assessing hypoxia clinically. We aimed to conduct a technical validation of a hypoxia gene expression signature using the TaqMan Low Density Array (TLDA) platform to investigate if this approach reliably identified hypoxic tumours.

Materials And Methods: Tumour samples (n=201) from 80 HNSCC patients were collected prospectively from two centres.

Importance of intracellular pH in determining the uptake and efficacy of the weakly basic chemotherapeutic drug, doxorubicin.

Low extracellular pH (pH(e)), that is characteristic of many tumours, tends to reduce the uptake of weakly basic drugs, such as doxorubicin, thereby conferring a degree of physiological resistance to chemotherapy. It has been assumed, from pH-partition theory, that the effect of intracellular pH (pH(i)) is symmetrically opposite, although this has not been tested experimentally. Doxorubicin uptake into colon HCT116 cells was measured using the drug's intrinsic fluorescence under conditions that alter pH(i) and pH(e) or pH(i) alone.

Oral steroids for nasal polyps.

Background: This is an update of a Cochrane Review first published in The Cochrane Library in Issue 1, 2007.Benign nasal polyps are lesions that arise from the mucosa of the nasal cavity or one or more of the nasal sinuses. The presenting symptoms are nasal obstruction, watery anterior rhinorrhoea (excessive nasal secretions) or mucopurulent postnasal drip (or both), hyposmia and anosmia (reduced or absent sense of smell) with a concomitant alteration in taste and infrequently pain over the dorsum of the nose, forehead and cheeks.