Hypothesis: hematogenous metastatic cancer cells of solid tumors may disguise themselves as memory macrophages for metastasis.

German pathologist Otto Aichel suggested, a century ago, that the cancer cell acquired its metastatic property from a leukocyte via cell-cell fusion. Since then, several revised versions of this theory have been proposed. Most of the proposals attribute the generation of the metastatic cancer cell to the fusion between a primary cancer cell and a macrophage.

Cortical thickness and functional connectivity abnormality in chronic headache and low back pain patients.

This study aims to characterize the psychological wellbeing of chronic headache (CH) patients, to identify cortical structural abnormalities and any associations of those abnormalities with resting state functional connectivity (rsFC), and to determine whether such rsFC abnormality is specific to CH patients. Compared with healthy controls (CON ), CH patients suffered from mild depression, sleep disturbances, and relatively poor quality of life. CH patients also exhibited widespread cortical thickness (CT) abnormalities in left premotor (BA6), right primary somatosensory (S1) and right prefrontal (BA10) cortices, as well as in regions of default mode and executive control networks.

Abnormal dynamics of cortical resting state functional connectivity in chronic headache patients.

The goals of this study are to characterize the temporal dynamics of inter-regional connectivity of the brain in chronic headache (CH) patients versus their age/gender matched controls (CON, n=28 pairs), and to determine whether dynamic measures reveal additional features to static functional connectivity and correlate with psychometric scores. Cortical thickness and inter-regional resting state fMRI connectivity were quantified and compared between CH and CON groups. Six cortical regions of interest (ROI) pairs that exhibited correlated cortical thickness and static functional connectivity abnormalities were selected for temporal dynamic analysis.