• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.7
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• pp.4015-4023
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• 2013

Cancer of the cervix is the third most common cancer in women worldwide, more than 85% of the cases occurring in developing countries such as China. In China, since a national cancer registry is already set up but with geographically limited data generated, the burden of cervical cancer is believed to be underestimated. High-risk human papillomavirus (HR-HPV) prevalence among women attending routine cervical cancer screening programs has been shown to correlate well with cervical cancer incidence rates based on independently obtained HPV prevalence data as well as findings for the worldwide cervical cancer burden. Therefore, reviewing data on HR-HPV prevalence in population-based screening studies and hospital-based case studies will be important in the context of better understanding the cervical cancer burden and for the evaluation of the potential impact of HPV vaccination in the country. With the advent of prophylactic vaccines, significant progress is likely to be made in cervical cancer prevention. This article reviews available data on the HPV epidemiology over a 12-year time period (2001-2012) in mainland China under different epidemiological aspects: by age group of study population, by ethnicity, by geographic area, as well as time period. The authors also review the potential acceptability of HPV vaccination among Chinese women.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.16 no.13
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• pp.5401-5406
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• 2015

Background: Brain metastases are the most common intra-cranial neoplasms. The incidence is on a rise due to advanced imaging techniques. Aims: The objective of the study was to analyse the clinical and demographic profile of patients with brain metastases from primary solid tumors. Materials and Methods: This is a retrospective single institutional study covering 130 consecutive patients with brain metastases from January 2007 to August 2014. Results: Some 64.6% of the patients were females. The majority were in the sixth decade of life. The site of the primary tumor was the lungs in 50.8% of the cases. The overall median time from the diagnosis of the primary malignancy to detection of brain metastases was 21.4 months. Survival was found to be significantly improved in patients with solitary brain lesions when compared to patients with multiple brain metastases, and in patients undergoing surgical excision with or without cranial irradiation when compared to whole brain irradiation alone. The majority of the cases belonged to the recursive partitioning analysis class II group. Whole brain radiation therapy was delivered to 79% of the patients. Conclusions: Most of the patients with brain metastases in the study belonged to recursive partitioning analysis classes II or III, and hence had poor prognosis. Most of the patients in the Indian context either do not satisfy the indications for surgical excision or are incapable of bearing the high cost associated with stereotactic radiosurgery. Treatment should be tailored on an individual basis to all these patients.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.4795-4800
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• 2013

The involvement of non-government organizations (NGOs) and support groups has helped strengthen public health services in addressing cancer care burden. Owing to the contribution of volunteers in cancer care, this article documents a qualitative study that examined challenges in attracting and retaining cancer care volunteers as part of the effort to develop a volunteer recruitment model. Data were collected through three focus group discussions involving 19 cancer support group members in Malaysia. Findings of the study revealed that mobility and locality appeared to be significant in Malaysian context, while the need for financial support and time flexibility are challenges faced by cancer support groups to attract and retain volunteers. The findings imply that cancer care initiatives can benefit from more local volunteers but at the same time these volunteers require flexibility and financial support to sustain their engagement.

• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.204-227
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• 2018

This paper seeks to interrogate the very assumption of "sociality" in social media at a conceptual level and substantiate it with the help of information collected on aged people's use of conventional media $vis-{\grave{a}}-vis$ so called "social media" from the field work. Although global literature has written the obituary of mass media and promoted the "sociality" of social media, one needs to critically engage with such statement. Such statements have been an outcome of the established status of the "post broadcast" model of media where conventional media is in existence for some time and accessible to everyone in society. Further, this paper seeks to explore the interplay of new media in the life of the aged population in select areas of Kolkata city in the state of West Bengal, India. There are few studies on the ageing population's use of new media in the Indian context. While many of the studies reveal the new media literacy among the youth, this is unimportant as both the new media and the youth are relatively young as a field of research in media studies in India. What is missed in the earlier studies is, how new media plays an important function in the life of the aged population. How do older adults engage with the skilling and deskilling process of media literacy in their everyday life? And finally, do new media provide an extension to their on-going social relations? With the help of substantive details, the present study addresses the aforementioned queries.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.1321-1325
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• 2015

Self-care to prevent cancer and self-management to cope with the disease are two discrete effective mechanisms for improving of control and management of neoplasia. Both them have certain strategies and practices. Often the two are used interchangeably despite their different approaches. Strategies of self-care usually refer to prevention at different levels include primary, secondary and tertiary. In contrast, strategies of self-management are related to management and alleviation of unpleasant cancer-related symptoms and treatment-related side effects for improving the quality of life of cancer survivors. Successful promoting of self-care and self-management strategies need people and survivor empowerment. Within this context, innovative approaches open a new window. In this paper after a brief review of related strategies and practices, we provide an explanation of how cancer portals may play an important role in the empowerment process and what are key potentials for implementing of self-care and self-management strategies for cancer.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.781-784
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• 2014

Background: Although the cause in most cases of childhood leukemia is not known, the contribution of environmental risk factors in the context of genetic predisposition has been reported with inconsistent results. The aim of this study was to examine association of childhood leukemia with maternal factors especially during pregnancy, to help in avoiding risk factors. Materials and Methods: This case-control study included children younger than 18 years diagnosed with leukemia from 2008 to 2012. Controls were randomly selected and individually matched to cases with respect to age, sex, and residency. All variables were compared between cases and control to determine any significant association with leukemia. Results: Statistically significant associations between risk of childhood leukemia with mother's education (p=0.001), occupation (p=0.0005) and pesticides exposure (p=0.005) during pregnancy were found. However, there were no significant links with maternal age (p=0.090), history of fetal loss (0.85), history of radiography during pregnancy (p=0.400), history of drug intake (p=0.689) and infection (p=0.696) during pregnancy. Conclusions: The results showed increased risk of leukemia in children whose mothers were working in agriculture and were exposed to pesticides during pregnancy. The further study needs to be investigated to know association of various maternal risk factors with leukemia which remained unknown in this study.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.2983-2986
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• 2013

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small, non-coding RNAs (18-25 nucleotides) that post-transcriptionally modulate gene expression by negatively regulating the stability or translational efficiency of their target mRNAs. In this context, the present study aimed to evaluate the in vitro effects of miR-153 inhibition in the breast carcinoma cell line MDA-MB-231. Forty-eight hours after MDA-MB-231 cells were transfected with the miR-153 inhibitor, an MTT (3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide) assay was utilized to determine the effects of miR-153 on cell viability. Flow cytometry analysis and assessment of caspase 3/7 activity were adopted to determine whether miR-153 affects the proliferation rates and apoptosis levels of MDA-MB-231 cells. Our results showed that silencing of miR-153 significantly inhibited growth when compared to controls at 48 hours, reducing proliferation by 37.6%, and inducing apoptosis. Further studies are necessary to corroborate our findings and examine the potential use of this microRNA in future diagnostic and therapeutic interventions.

• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.7-25
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• 2013

For the Palestinians, what is the impact of the Arab Spring? The revolution not only dislodged Mubarak from the presidency, but also changed Egyptian policy regarding Palestinians in Gaza. New Egyptian diplomacy has encouraged Hamas and Fatah, which had been in dispute, to seek reconciliation and has loosened the border control on humanitarian grounds. We focus on Palestinian voting attitudes in the wake of the Arab Spring. Despite the vast quantity of literature written about Palestinian politics since the first decade of the millennium, we know little about the determinants of Palestinian attitudes toward the divided governments in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Fatah government, in the West Bank, increased in popularity after submitting a request for UN recognition of Palestinian statehood. In Gaza, the Hamas government lost popularity because of mismanagement but won support through the success of its prisoner swap deal with Israel. However, evaluation of the ruling party does not depend only on one-time events. This research attempts to measure the impact of policy change in Gaza after the Arab Spring. We provide an account of our research on Palestinian attitudes toward the divided governments based on two sets of the original survey data conducted in May 2009 and June 2012. The paper sheds light on Palestinian attitudes and makes clear the effects of "democratization" in the Middle East and the effects of regional context factors on the occupied Palestinians.

• Journal of Christian Education in Korea
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• v.61
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• pp.109-129
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• 2020

This study reflects the regional context of Northeast Asian countries embodied in US-North Korean nuclear tension. The researcher uses the methodological inquiry of practical theology to analyze the political affairs and intertwine with religious education. The ecology of religious education to dismantle the threat of ethnic and racial discrimination such as white supremacy supports a shared pedagogy between students and their teachers in the narrative of Jesus to challenge all forms of oppression as the democratic presence of God.

• Asian Journal of Innovation and Policy
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.103-130
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• 2018

It is generally understood that clusters are the promoters of innovation and therefore, the attention of researchers has been increasingly to discern the factors driving innovation among the firms in a cluster, especially in a high-tech cluster. In this study, we identify the variables capturing the nature of a firm that possibly impact the absorptive capacity of a firm and subsequently ascertain their impact on the degree of interactions between a firm, and other firms and associated institutions within and outside a cluster, respectively. Furthermore, we probe the influence of these interactions as a whole on firm-level innovation. The study was carried out in the context of Bengaluru, which houses the densely interconnected network of innovation-intensive high-tech manufacturing firms forming a high-tech manufacturing cluster. Data were drawn from 101 high-tech manufacturing firms belonging to electronics, machine tools, electrical and pharmaceutical industries. Based on the cluster analysis and subsequent graphical analysis on each of the three profiled clusters, it was found that size and origin of a firm have significant impact on the degree of firm's interactions. In turn, higher dynamism of firms in terms of degree of interactions led to higher innovation performance.