Objectives. To assess the activity of vinorelbine in women with recurrent or resistant epithelial ovarian cancer following treatment with platinum and paclitaxel in terms of survival rate at 6 months, objective response rate (in the subset of patients with bidimensionally measurable disease), and health-related quality of life.Methods. Seventy-nine evaluable patients with progressive ovarian cancer following platinum and taxane therapy received vinorelbine 30 mg/m(2) days 1 and 8 of a 21-day treatment cycle.Results. Six-month survival rate for the entire group was 65% (95% CI: 54-75%) and median survival was 10.1 months (95% CI: 7.7-13.6 months). In the 71 women with measurable disease, 0 complete and 2 partial responses were observed (RR = 3%) (95% CI: 0.3-10%). Patients reported substantial symptom-related distress at baseline, which persisted, but did not worsen, during treatment. Patients also had impaired physical functioning at baseline and this continued to decline during treatment.Conclusions. The 6-month survival rate achieved with salvage vinorelbine is comparable to the results obtained with other salvage therapies in patients with relapsed ovarian cancer. During the initial 10 weeks of treatment, vinorelbine did not appear to be effective in alleviating the symptom-related distress or progressive impairment of physical functioning associated with this disease. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Much has been made of the impact of the WTO on trade with China as it further integrates into global economy and as it interacts with foreign markets. Using an industry case study, this paper seeks to investigate whether these institutions can really affect everyday transactions as intended. Many observers, inside and outside China, subscribe to the sentiment that WTO accession will act as further stimulant to economic reforms and growth. China is widely acknowledged as the dominant force in the world textile sector. Australia has been supplying China's wool textile sector with raw material for

The introduction of software to calculate maximum likelihood estimates for mixed linear models has made likelihood estimation a practical alternative to methods based on sums of squares. Likelihood based tests and confidence intervals, however, may be misleading in problems with small sample sizes. This paper discusses an adjusted version of the directed log-likelihood statistic for mixed models that is highly accurate for testing one parameter hypotheses. Introduced by Skovgaard (1996, Journal of the Bernoulli Society, 2, 145-165), we show in mixed models that the statistic has a simple compact form that may be obtained from standard software. Simulation studies indicate that this statistic is more accurate than many of the specialized procedures that have been advocated.