Morphometric analysis of cisplatin-induced neurite outgrowth in N1E-115 neuroblastoma cells.

Cisplatin, a widely used cytostatic drug for the control of a variety of neoplastic tumors, unexpectedly induced neurite outgrowth in N1E-115 neuroblastoma cells and this phenomenon was studied further in detail with morphometric analysis. As expected, cisplatin dose-dependently reduced cell number. At the same time, however, cisplatin affected the morphology of the neuroblastoma cells that changed from small rounded cell bodies into large flat cell bodies with neurites. The neurite length/cell as a function of cisplatin concentration showed a bell-shaped curve. The maximal effect (1200% of control) on neurite length/cell was observed at 1 microgram/ml cisplatin. In conclusion, cisplatin induced cellular differentiation in N1E-115 neuroblastoma cells at and just above threshold doses for cytostatic activity.

Improved left ventricular function after renal transplantation.

Patients with severely impaired left ventricular function are known to have a poor prognosis. We describe a 20-year-old man with end-stage renal failure, on dialysis, with severely impaired left ventricular function which dramatically improved after renal transplantation. This suggests that poor left ventricular function need not preclude renal transplantation and may, in fact, offer an alternative to combined renal and cardiac transplantation.

Local cerebral glucose uptake in anatomically defined structures of freely moving rats.

Two limitations of the classical [14C]2-deoxyglucose (DG) method are the severe stress to which the restrained animals are exposed, and the difficulties with the anatomical analysis of the autoradiograms. The present study describes modifications which circumvent these limitations. Firstly, rats are provided with two chronic indwelling cannulas to allow blood sampling under unrestrained conditions. Absence of stress is demonstrated by low plasma corticosterone levels in the cannulated rats at the start of the experiment. The second modification concerns the image analysis system. The image of the autoradiogram is superimposed on the image of the identical histologically stained section in order to improve the accuracy of the structure identification. This approach enables the operator to delineate the anatomical brain structure in the histologically stained section and quantify the glucose uptake in the autoradiogram generated from this section. The reproducibility of the present quantitative measuring system is illustrated by glucose uptake measurements in different laminar zones of the various fields in the dorsal hippocampal formation. It is concluded that the present technical improvements of the classically applied [14C]2-deoxyglucose technique provide favourable conditions for the quantitative study on cerebral glucose uptake in normally behaving animals.