Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to R D Barnes.
A patient with diffuse localized amyloidosis of the bladder was considered for cystectomy because of intractable gross hematuria. Oral colchicine (2 mg. daily) was commenced and 4 years later the patient was asymptomatic with minimal evidence of amyloidosis cystoscopically.
The records of 62 patients with carcinoma of the penis seen at Groote Schuur Hospital between 1968 and 1985 were analysed retrospectively. Jackson's staging system was used - 44% of patients were stage 1, 27% stage 2, 19% stage 3 and 10% stage 4. The results of treatment in each stage are outlined. Overall 65% of patients were alive and free of disease at follow-up while 24% died. The overall five-year survival rate was 56%. The management of the inguinal nodes is discussed. Early sentinel node biopsy is recommended, as clinical inguinal node assessment is inaccurate and late detection of inguinal node metastases is associated with a poor prognosis.
A 50-year-old patient with carcinoma of the penis was referred for therapy of clinically fixed and ulcerated right inguinal adenopathy and mobile left inguinal adenopathy. He was treated initially by weekly infusions of methotrexate and bleomycin which resulted in clinical mobility and a decrease in size of his right sided adenopathy and re-epitheliazation of the overlying ulcer. A right- and subsequently a left-sided inguinal lymphadenectomy were performed. The patient remained clear of disease at follow-up 44 months after therapy.
Eighteen patients with metastatic non-seminomatous germ-cell tumours (NSGCTs) of the testis were treated with cis-platin combination chemotherapy between 1979 and 1985. Three of the patients received chemotherapy after a staging lymphadenectomy (stage 2 disease) and were free of disease at follow-up. Fifteen patients with stage II disease and adverse prognostic factors or stage III disease received initial chemotherapy followed in 11 cases by surgical exploration. Eleven of these patients were free of disease at a median follow-up of 52 months, 1 was alive at 35 months with a mature teratoma, which is non-progressive, 2 died of their cancer, and 1 died of acute respiratory distress syndrome after surgery. The patients who failed to respond to therapy had associated bulky disease. The overall 5-year survival rate is 81%. Before the introduction of cis-platin there were no survivors among 9 patients with metastatic NSGCTs treated initially with chemotherapy. These findings indicate that the good results reported with cis-platin combination chemotherapy for NSGCTs are reproducible in other populations and centres.
Four rat serum proteins were found to be selectively depleted from the culture medium by 10 day rat embryos. These were alpha 2-macroglobulin, transferrin and 2 other proteins which had molecular weights of 132,000 and 214,000. Possibly a 5th protein, alpha 1-acid glycoprotein, was also depleted but its concentration was already low at the start of culture.
Intrauterine injection of human whole blood into rabbit and rhesus monkey fetuses was found to result in long lasting unresponsiveness to human serum albumin. Intrauterine injection of viable allogeneic bone marrow cells into rabbit fetuses was without any apparent harmful effect and also resulted in permanent unresponsiveness demonstrated by donor red cell survival studies. The implication of these findings in respect of using this approach towards the correction of certain inherited diseases in man is discussed.
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CBA/H-T6Crc mice, a substrain that does not normally express demonstrable levels of murine leukaemia virus (MuLV) and has a low natural incidence of leukaemia, were examined for evidence of virus activation at various times following X-irradiation. Although X-irradiation caused a high incidence of leukaemia, no ecotropic, xenotropic or recombinant MuLV was detected by in vitro co-cultivation of bone marrow, spleen and thymus cells from pre-leukaemic and leukaemic animals with selectively permissive cell lines followed by indirect immunofluorescence for MuLV group-specific (gs) antigen. These results, therefore, are not consistent with the hypothesis that endogenous viruses are the universal aetiological agents of leukaemia.
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A solid-phase radioimmunoassay utilising bind of 125I-labelled protein A to antibodies bound to virus adsorbed onto microtitre plates was shown to be suitable for detection of humoral immunity to Gross murine leukaemia virus (MuLV). The specificity of the reaction was shown by the fact that only homologous or closely related viruses effectively inhibited binding of antibodies to adsorbed virus. With this method a low level of spontaneous humoral immunity was demonstrated in sera from AKR/Crc mice, a strain with high concentrations of endogenous virus, whereas little or no anti-viral activity was found inCBA/H-T6Crc, a subline that does not appear to express MuLV.
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Explore the source record for details and available documents.
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An experiment was conducted to determine whether the phenomenal experiences associated with the states of objective and subjective self-awareness are those which typically are associated with the states of individuation and deindividuation. In order to test this hypothesis, 20 male and 20 female matched pairs of subjects completed 15 self-descriptive statements on a Who Am I questionnaire under conditions of experimentally manipulated self-awareness (high vs. low). The obtained responses were then coded on 21 dimensions of self-conception, including several suggested by Gordon (1968). Converging result from a number of different measures indicated that increased objective self-awareness led to a more individuated conception of self. More specifically, objective self-awareness appeared to increase responding on dimensions which reflect individuation but to decrease responding on dimensions which reflect deindividuation suggested that this effect held strongly for low self-monitoring subjects. The self-descriptions of high self-monitoring subjects, however, appeared to be relatively unaffected by situationally induced self-awareness.
The possibility of autoantibodies--other than sperm antibodies--developing as a consequence of vasectomy has been investigated in 255 volunteers. During the first year after vasectomy no obvious increase was observed in the occurrence of any of these antibodies (rheumatoid factor, antinuclear antibodies and antibodies against smooth muscle, mitochondria, gastric parietal cell, thyroid microsomes and thyroglobulin). Ninety-nine of the patients were also examined for agglutinating and immunofluorescent antibodies to sperm to see if there was any relationship between the occurrence of anti-sperm antibodies and other autoantibodies. However, the prevalence of non-sperm autoantibodies did not differ in two nearly equal groups of patients with and without indications of autoimmune reactions to spermatozoa, respectively. Consequently the present results lend no support to the hypothesis that vasectomy could induce autoimmunity to other autoantigens than sperm-specific antigens.
Tetraparental mouse chimaeras formed by aggregation of early embryos have been utilised in the study of immunological mechanisms. Tolerance in chimaeras has proven somewhat controversial, but recent evidence has suggested the existence of "classic" tolerance and furthermore that this is achieved by elimination of cells potentially capable of fatal self in equilibrium self reactivity. Clonal elimination was also considered to be responsible for the "correction" of the autoimmune disease of NZB mice made chimaeric with a normal strain. It is now suggested that a similar mechanism may be responsible for the "normal" elimination of any aberrant autoimmune clone in both mouse and man.