Long term outcome of the Bascom cleft lift procedure for adolescent pilonidal sinus.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess whether adolescent patients who heal their pilonidal sinus disease with the Bascom cleft lift have a sustained result, or if younger age puts them at increased risk of relapse.

Methods: Twenty-two consecutive patients (18 male, median age 16years at surgery) who underwent Bascom procedures were contacted regarding long term outcomes following surgery. Additional clinical data were collected from the medical records of the subjects.

Why wait: early enteral feeding after pediatric gastrostomy tube placement.

Purpose: Early initiation of feedings after gastrostomy tube (GT) placement may reduce associated hospital costs, but many surgeons fear complications could result from earlier feeds. We hypothesized that, irrespective of placement method, starting feedings within the first 6h following GT placement would not result in a greater number of post-operative complications.

Methods: An IRB-approved retrospective review of all GTs placed between January 2012 and December 2014 at three academic institutions was undertaken.

Microenvironmental stiffness enhances glioma cell proliferation by stimulating epidermal growth factor receptor signaling.

The aggressive and rapidly lethal brain tumor glioblastoma (GBM) is associated with profound tissue stiffening and genomic lesions in key members of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) pathway. Previous studies from our laboratory have shown that increasing microenvironmental stiffness in culture can strongly enhance glioma cell behaviors relevant to tumor progression, including proliferation, yet it has remained unclear whether stiffness and EGFR regulate proliferation through common or independent signaling mechanisms. Here we test the hypothesis that microenvironmental stiffness regulates cell cycle progression and proliferation in GBM tumor cells by altering EGFR-dependent signaling.

Extracellular matrix rigidity modulates neuroblastoma cell differentiation and N-myc expression.

Neuroblastoma is a pediatric malignancy characterized by tremendous clinical heterogeneity, in which some tumors are extremely aggressive while others spontaneously differentiate into benign forms. Because the degree of differentiation correlates with prognosis, and because differentiating agents such as retinoic acid (RA) have proven to decrease mortality, much effort has been devoted to identifying critical regulators of neuroblastoma differentiation in the cellular microenvironment, including cues encoded in the extracellular matrix (ECM). While signaling between tumor cells and the ECM is classically regarded to be based purely on biochemical recognition of ECM ligands by specific cellular receptors, a number of recent studies have made it increasingly clear that the biophysical properties of the ECM may also play an important role in this cross-talk.