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A 78-year-old female complained high fever and vomiting. The ultrasonographic examination revealed a giant tumor above the left kidney. She was referred to our hospital for further examinations and treatments. Radiographic examination showed a solid mass of 10 cm in diameter, smooth surface, and sharply-delimited, above the left kidney corresponding to the left adrenal gland. Other organs showed no evidence of disease. Hormonal examination was normal. She was diagnosed as left non-functioning adrenal tumor, and underwent surgery. The resected specimen was 11 x 10 x 7 cm, 460 g with a part of normal adrenal tissue on the surface. Histopathological examination revealed it as leiomyosarcoma. She has no evidence of disease twenty months after the operation. Primary adrenal leiomyosarcoma is extremely rare. To the best of our knowledge, there were only 22 reported cases including ours in the English and Japanese literature.

OBJECTIVES We investigated whether preoperative parameters predict pathological stage at radical prostatectomy for patients with clinically localized prostatic cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS We studied a total of 160 men with clinically localized prostatic cancer (less than or equal to clinical T2) who underwent radical rertropubic prostatectomy at Wakayama Medical University. Clinical Ts patients are not included in this study. Preoperative parameters include patient age, Body Mass Index, preoperative serum PSA value, biopsy Gleason score, clinical stage, the percent of positive biopsy cores (%PosBx) and the percent of positive biopsy cores on the dominant side (%DomPosBx). Univariate and multivariate analysis were performed to examine the prognostic significance of these preoperative parameters. Significant independent factors were combined to create a table to predict pathologically organ confined disease. RESULTS Univariate analysis showed preoperative serum PSA value (p< 0.001), biopsy Gleason score (p =0.001), clinical stage (p = 0.026), %PosBx (p= 0.002) and %DomPosBx (p=0.003) were significantly related to the pathological stage. On multivariate analysis, serum PSA value (p< 0.01), biopsy Gleason score (p

The present investigation was designed to study adhesion of calcium oxalate crystals on the surface of intact MDCK cells quantitatively, and to estimate the effects of glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) and cell injuries on these adhesions. Calcium oxalate monohydrate (COM) crystals adhere to the cell surface by an active force, and the attachment is in a time and concentration dependency with plateau. Pre-treatments with low concentration of GAGs (chondroitin sulphate C, hyaluronic acid, heparan sulphate, heparin and sodium pentosan polysulphate) produce significant reductions of the adhesion. There are significant decreases of the adhesions with pre-treatments of Triton-X100, 0.1 N HCl and gentamicin. These phenomena might be induced by some alterations of cell surface structures or characters. The current quantitative system on MDCK cells should serve as a useful model for the investigations of interactions with crystals and tubular cells. Our studies may also support the hypothesis of attachment of microcrystals to the cellular membrane, which is one of the most important and the earliest process of the pathophysiology of kidney stone.