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Showing 15451 - 15500International Group Updates Recommendations on Managing Lymphoma
An international multidisciplinary group of experts has updated their recommendations for staging and treatment response assessment in patients with Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphomas. Bruce D. Cheson, MD, Professor of Medicine, Deputy Chief of Hematology-Oncology, and Head of Hematology at the...
Oncology Practice: What Are the Factors Driving Change?
Clinical practice changes in response to new medical evidence, but not always immediately or all at once. So what else determines whether and how quickly practice changes in response to evidence, for instance, that a widely used drug is effective only in patients with a certain biomarker? In a new...
Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy an Effective Option for Early-Stage Lung Cancer Patients
Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) is safe and effective in early-stage non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), as it confers local control in 90% or more patients with T1 disease, according to Roy Decker, MD, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Therapeutic Radiology at Yale Cancer...
How Evolutionary Game Theory Is Offering Clues to Disrupt Cancer Cell Metabolism
Kenneth J. Pienta, MD, and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore are using the principles of evolutionary game theory to learn how cancer cells cooperate within a tumor to gather energy and metastasize. Game theory, the mathematic study of strategic decision-making that is commonly...
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Launches Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy Programs for Terminally Ill Patients, Cancer Survivors, and Caregivers
Although most major cancer centers in the United States offer support groups and individual counseling sessions to help patients with cancer cope with their disease and treatment, over the past decade Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York has broadened its psycho-oncology programs to...
Para-Aortic Lymph Node Radiation Raises Risk of Developing Diabetes Mellitus in Hodgkin Lymphoma Survivors
Radiation to the para-aortic lymph nodes, “leading to radiation exposure of the pancreas, is associated with a dose-dependent increased risk” of developing diabetes mellitus among long-term survivors of Hodgkin lymphoma (HL), according to a study by Frederika A. van Nimwegen, MSc, of the...
Allogeneic Conditioning Regimen Reduces Myelosuppression, Graft-vs-Host Disease in Lymphocytic Leukemia/Lymphoma
The combination of bendamustine (Treanda), fludarabine, and rituximab (Rituxan), or BFR, was shown to be safe and effective conditioning for patients with relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia/lymphoma receiving allogeneic stem cell transplantation from related or unrelated donors. “Remarkably,...
Substantial Reductions in Surgical Site Infections After Colorectal Surgery With Bundling Approach
Use of a preventive surgical site infection bundle that spanned the phases or perioperative care “was associated with a substantial reduction in [surgical site infections] after colorectal surgery,” according to results of a retrospective study of 559 patients who underwent major elective...
No Survival Benefits With Erlotinib and Whole-Brain Radiotherapy for NSCLC With Multiple Brain Metastases
“To exploit the potential radiosensitizing properties, the direct effect on brain metastases, and systemic activity of erlotinib,” researchers from the United Kingdom tested concurrent erlotinib and whole-brain radiotherapy followed by maintenance erlotinib in patients with of non–small cell lung...
Most Women Who Choose Breast Reconstruction Are Satisfied With Decision-Making Process
Most patients who choose to have breast reconstruction following mastectomy are satisfied with the decision-making process. Reasons for not choosing reconstruction vary by race and include the desire to avoid additional surgery and fear of implants. These and other conclusions of an analysis of...
Pro-oxidant Molecule Imexon Shows Clinical Activity in Relapsed/Refractory B-Cell NHL
The pro-oxidant molecule imexon (Amplimexon/NSC-714597) produced an overall response rate of 30% in patients with relapsed/refractory B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) participating in a phase II study. Noting that “lymphoma cells are subject to higher levels of oxidative stress than their normal...
Remarkable Response to Sorafenib in Advanced Lung Adenocarcinoma and Oncogenic ARAF Mutation
As reported in Journal of Clinical Investigation by Imielinski and colleagues, whole-genome and RNA sequencing of tumor and normal tissue in a patient with advanced lung adenocarcinoma who exhibited a remarkable response to sorafenib (Nexavar) revealed a somatic ARAF S214 mutation expressed at high ...
Tissue Microenvironment Affects Activity of PTEN in Leukemia
The tumor suppressor PTEN, which is underexpressed in many cancers, dephosphorylates phosphatidylinositol (3,4,5)-triphosphate and thus inhibits activity of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinases involved in growth factor and survival factor signaling through effectors such as Akt and mTOR. As reported in...
News of Mutations in PALB2 Gene Raising Risk of Breast Cancer Offers Opportunity to Explain Limits of Genetic Testing
The response among patients to news reports about mutations in a gene known as PALB2 raising the risk of breast cancer “has been predictable,” Theodora Ross, MD, PhD, wrote in The New York Times.1 As an example, Dr. Ross, Director of the Cancer Genetics Program at The University of Texas...
Breast Cancer Has Led Me to Careers in Activism and Filmmaking
The last thing I expected to find when I returned home after a summer vacation celebrating my 50th birthday was a letter from my gynecologist saying the routine mammogram I had before I left found suspicious-looking calcifications in my right breast and that I should see a surgeon right away. Being ...
ASTRO Honors Jasan Zimmerman With 2014 Survivor Circle Award
The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) presented the 2014 Survivor Circle Award to San Francisco Bay Area resident and cancer survivor Jasan Zimmerman during ASTRO’s 56th Annual Meeting held recently in San Francisco. The Survivor Circle Award recognizes a cancer survivor who lives in...
The Role of Music Therapy in Cancer Care
Music therapy, an established adjuvant to standard cancer care, is offered in a growing number of cancer centers throughout the United States and internationally. Defined by the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) as “the evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individual...
I Work for You
The following essay by James O. Armitage, MD, is excerpted from The Big Casino: America’s Best Cancer Doctors Share Their Most Powerful Stories, which was co-edited by Stan Winokur, MD, and Vincent Coppola and published in May 2014. The book is available on Amazon.com and at thebigcasino.org. The ...
Cancer Frontier: Bringing the New Sciences to an Old School
Cancer seems to have an endless supply of people who want to write about it. Why not? It’s an intriguing subject of life and death and struggle and hope, one that touches virtually every person of a certain age. However, the bookshelves are filled with cancer survivorship books, so to stand out, an ...
Potential of Liquid Biopsies in Detecting Cancer and Establishing Prognosis
Tests in development to detect circulating tumor cells that escape from solid tumors and travel through the blood, spreading cancer to new sites, may serve as an alternative to conventional tissue biopsy for early cancer diagnosis and gene-expression analysis over the next decade. According to...
FDA Grants Priority Review to Lanreotide Injection for Gastroenteropancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted and granted priority review to Ipsen’s supplemental New Drug Application (sNDA) for the somatostatin analog lanreotide (Somatuline Depot) 120 mg injection in the treatment of gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors. The FDA designates...
Delivering Cancer Care in Low-Income Countries
In eealthy industrialized nations like the United States, escalating costs of cancer care have put the term “cost-effective care” on the forefront of health-care policy discussions. However, the cost issues we wrestle with in our $3 trillion health-care system are vague abstractions for much of the ...
Immunotherapy Research of James P. Allison, PhD, Has Led to a Paradigm Shift in the Treatment of Cancer
James P. Allison, PhD, has been bucking the status quo since he was a teenager growing up in the small agricultural town of Alice, Texas, in the 1950s and 1960s. He first butted heads with authority figures when he was in high school and learned that his biology class had omitted the teaching of...
Expert Point of View: Karla Kerlikowske, MD
In an accompanying editorial,1 Karla Kerlikowske, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues point out that while the finding of Killelea et al that digital mammography screening was not associated with downstaging of disease may not be surprising, given the similar accuracy ...
Study Finds Increased Breast Cancer Screening Costs in Medicare Population but No Increase in Cancer Detection
In a study of the use of breast cancer screening modalities in the Medicare population reported in Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Brigid K. Killelea, MD, MPH, FACS, and colleagues at Yale University School of Medicine, Yale Cancer Center, and Yale–New Haven Hospital, New Haven,...
Breast Cancer Screening Using Tomosynthesis in Combination With Digital Mammography
In a study reported in JAMA and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, Friedewald and colleagues1 showed that the addition of tomosynthesis to digital mammography2 resulted in a decrease in the screening recall rate3 and an increase in the cancer detection rate.4,5 This retrospective analysis of...
National Cancer Institute Launches the National Clinical Trials Network to Expedite Scientific Advances
In March, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) transformed its Cooperative Group Program into the National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN). Spurred by recommendations in the Institute of Medicine (IOM) 2010 report, A National Cancer Clinical Trials System for the 21st Century: Reinvigorating the NCI...
Timing and Meaning of Do-Not-Resuscitate Orders in the Palliative Care Setting
Although a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order does not mean “do not treat,” that is how it is often interpreted, according to a study examining the level of care oncology inpatients at a tertiary care hospital received.1 The study found that the interpretation of DNR orders among oncology nurses and...
Complications No Different Between Open and Robot-Assisted Radical Cystectomy When Open Urinary Diversion Performed
We read the letter to the editor in the July 24, 2014, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine entitled, “A Randomized Trial of Robot-Assisted Laparoscopic Radical Cystectomy,” with great interest.1 Provocative Results In the letter, reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, Bochner and...
NCCN Marks 20 Years of Evidence-Based Decision-Making in Small Cell Lung Cancer
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) recently announced publication of the 20th annual edition of the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology (NCCN Guidelines) for Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC). One of the eight original NCCN Guidelines, the NCCN Guidelines for SCLC was initially...
Study Quantifies Risk of Hereditary Breast Cancer in Carriers of PALB2 Mutations
In a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Antonis C. Antoniou, PhD, Reader in Cancer Risk Prediction and Cancer Research UK Senior Cancer Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and colleagues identified lifetime risk of breast cancer in families with germline...
Lung Cancer Webinar Highlights Brain Metastases and Thoracic Radiotherapy
Postoperative radiation therapy, given after adjuvant chemotherapy, significantly increased overall survival in non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) compared to chemotherapy alone, according to a study reported at ASCO’s 2014 Annual Meeting.1 That study, an analysis of records in the National Cancer...
Optimal Chemoradiotherapy Dosing and Recurrence After Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy Explored in Lung Cancer Webinar
Cetuximab (Erbitux) added no survival benefit to chemoradiation in stage III non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to results reported in a Plenary Session of the 2013 World Conference on Lung Cancer in Sydney, Australia.1 It was the second surprise result from the Radiation Therapy...
2014 Lasker Award
The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation has announced Mary-Claire King, PhD, of the University of Washington, Seattle, will receive the 2014 Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award for her contributions to medical science and human rights. Dr. King’s demonstration of the existence of familial...
Angiogenesis in Ovarian Cancer: Are We Missing the Clinical Target?
Production of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is increased during normal ovulation, and can account for much of the reversible toxicity associated with ovarian hyperstimulation.1,2 We also have compelling data from multiple clinical trials to validate the importance of tumor-associated...
Adding Antiangiopoietin Agent Trebananib to Paclitaxel Improves Progression-Free Survival in Recurrent Epithelial Ovarian Cancer
Trebananib inhibits angiogenesis by blocking the binding of angiopoietins 1 and 2 to the Tie2 receptor expressed on endothelial cells, a mechanism that differs from vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) inhibitors and that involves a different signaling pathway. In the phase III TRINOVA-1 trial ...
Early Study Finds Olaparib Tablet Safe in Pretreated Ovarian Cancer Patients; More Effective in Those With BRCA Mutations
An oral tablet form of a poly-ADP ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitor, olaparib, given in combination with chemotherapy, was safe in heavily pretreated patients with ovarian cancer, and patients with BRCA mutations may have a better response compared with those without a BRCA mutation, according to...
European Researchers at 13-Year Follow-up: Increased Absolute Benefit of PSA Screening in Prostate Cancer Mortality, but Time for Population-Based Screening Has Not Arrived
The 13-year follow-up of the European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC), reported by Fritz H. Schröder, MD, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Urology at Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues in The Lancet, showed that prostate-specific...
FDA Approves Pembrolizumab for Advanced Melanoma
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today granted accelerated approval to the anti–PD-1 antibody pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for the treatment of patients with advanced or unresectable melanoma who are no longer responding to other drugs. Pembrolizumab is intended for use following treatment...
‘Paradigm-Shifting’ Results in Treatment of Hematologic Disorders
The three leukemia/lymphoma studies selected from the many 2014 ASCO Annual Meeting abstracts for presentation at the recent Best of ASCO meeting in Chicago “are really paradigm-shifting,” noted Lucy A. Godley, MD, PhD, of the University of Chicago. These studies, she said, “give great promise for...
Studies Help Refine Management of Prostate Cancer
Several studies reported at this year’s ASCO Annual Meeting address gray areas in the management of prostate cancer, according to Evan Y. Yu, MD, Associate Professor at the University of Washington and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. “In prostate cancer, probably the most excitement has happened...
In Managing Ovarian Cancer, Precision Medicine Is a Work in Progress
Precision medicine in the management of ovarian cancer “is a work in progress, to be sure,” Steven B. Newman, MD, noted in wrapping up the session on gynecologic cancer at the recent Best of ASCO meeting in Chicago. “A list of different histologic types of ovarian cancer and potential targets are...
Disparities Persist in Early-Stage Breast Cancer Treatment, MD Anderson Study Finds
Despite its acceptance as standard of care for early-stage breast cancer almost 25 years ago, barriers still exist that preclude patients from receiving breast-conserving therapy, with some patients still opting for a mastectomy, according to research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer ...
Hsp90 Inhibitors May Soon Transition Into Clinic
Inhibitors of heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) look promising for the treatment of advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and have the advantage of not needing a specific mutation to target, said Suresh S. Ramalingam, MD, Professor and Chief of Medical Oncology at the Winship Cancer Institute of...
In Advanced Lung Cancer, Targeted Combinations Are Still Works in Progress
For the treatment of advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), combinations of targeted agents are of great research interest but have not yet been shown to improve outcomes. Single-agent treatment with tyrosine kinase inhibitors, therefore, remains the standard of care for patients with...
9/11 and Cancer: What Do We Know?
On September 11, 2001, the devastating terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center left in its wake a unique toxic site in both mass and quantity of hazardous materials. It took 9 months to remove approximately 2 million tons of wreckage from Ground Zero, during which thousands of...
Will Oncologists Be the First to Cure Heart Disease?
Oncologists love jargon—a language peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group that facilitates communication among members. Our day-to-day communications, medical notes, and journal reports are filled with this type of jargon. Other definitions of jargon are less flattering, including...
Can Metastatic Lung Cancer Be Cured?
Don’t expect metastatic lung cancer to be cured any time soon, says Paul A. Bunn, Jr, MD, Professor and James Dudley Chair in Cancer Research at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Denver. “You have to be disease-free for some length of time in order to be cured, which is our goal,” he...
AACR 2014 Cancer Progress Report Call to Action: Prioritize Federal Funding for Biomedical Research
Last month, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) released its 2014 Cancer Progress Report: Transforming Lives Through Research, which highlights the quickening pace of drug development and approval, especially in molecularly targeted agents, that are leading to increased numbers of...
Patients With DCIS Have Decreased Risk of Cardiovascular Death, Independent of Treatment
Recent concerns about potential overdiagnosis and overtreatment of ductal carcinoma in situ of the breast (DCIS) led researchers in the Netherlands to study late effects of treatment, such as cardiovascular disease, morbidity, and mortality in a large population-based cohort of DCIS patients....
