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Purpose: The control of nausea and vomiting induced by chemotherapy is paramount for overall treatment success in cancer patients. Antiemetic therapy during chemotherapy in lymphoma patients generally consists of anti-serotoninergic drugs and dexamethasone. The aim of this trial was to evaluate the efficacy of a single dose of palonosetron, a second-generation serotonin type 3 (5-HT(3)) receptor antagonist, in patients with aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma receiving moderately emetogenic chemotherapy (MEC) containing steroids.Methods: Patients received a single intravenous bolus of palonosetron (0.25 mg) before administration of chemotherapy. Complete response (CR) defined as no vomiting and no rescue therapy during overall phase (0-120 h) was the primary endpoint. Complete control (CC) defined as CR and only mild nausea was a secondary endpoint.Results: Eighty-six evaluable patients entered in the study. A CR was observed in 74 patients (86.0%) during the overall phase; the CR during the acute (0-24 h) and delayed (24-120 h) phases was 90.7% and 88.4%, respectively. CC was 89.5% during the acute and 84.9% during the delayed phase; the overall CC was 82.6%.Conclusions: This was the first trial, which demonstrated the efficacy of a single dose of palonosetron in control CINV in patients with aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma receiving MEC regimen containing steroids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An identification procedure of concentrated damages in Euler-Bernoulli beams under static loads is presented in this work. The direct analysis problem is solved first by modeling concentrated damages as Dirac’s delta distributions in the flexural stiffness. Closed-form solutions for both statically determinate and indeterminate beams are presented in terms of damage intensities and positions. On this basis, for the inverse damage identification problem, a nonquadratic optimization procedure is proposed. The presented procedure relies on the minimization of an error function measuring the error between the analytical model response and experimental data. The procedure allows to recognize “a posteriori” some sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of the solution of the damage identification problem. The influence of the instrumental noise on the identified parameters is also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "Polymorphisms in xenobiotic transporters ABCB1, ABCG2, ABCC2, ABCC1, ABCC3 and multiple myeloma risk: a case-control study in the context of the International Multiple Myeloma rESEarch (IMMEnSE) consortium" by A. Martino and colleagues in a previous issue.