Anorectal melanoma is a rare malignant neoplasm that has a variable natural history and nonspecific presentation. A review by Hicks et al of 18 patients treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital between October 1991 and August 2012, finds that the cancer tends to be diagnosed at stage II or later and is...
Women who begin menstruation at an older age have a significantly increased risk of developing a brain tumor, a Moffitt Cancer Center study shows. The results are part of a large multicenter study to determine potential risk factors associated with the development of glioma and meningioma. The...
In a study of data from an integrated health-care delivery system reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Fehrenbacher et al found that patients with T1b node-negative localized breast cancer have a higher risk of distant invasive recurrence than those with T1a disease. Risk was highest among ...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved a new use for technetium 99m tilmanocept (Lymphoseek Injection), a radioactive diagnostic imaging agent used to help doctors determine the extent to which squamous cell carcinoma has spread in the body’s head and neck region. In 2013,...
In a Danish cohort study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Rugbjerg and colleagues found that survivors of adolescent and young adult cancer are at increased risk of cardiovascular disease throughout life, with cardiovascular disease profiles differing according to cancer...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Eberth et al found that needle biopsy is underused in diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer, with a number of surgeon factors contributing to underuse. The study involved Medicare data from 89,712 patients with breast cancer seen between...
In the first phase III trial assessing the combination of an insulin-like growth factor 1 receptor (IGF-1R) inhibitor with chemotherapy as first-line treatment for advanced nonadenocarcinoma non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the addition of the fully human immunoglobulin G2 monoclonal...
Palliative resection of the primary tumor was associated with a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in overall survival in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, according to the results of a study reported in the Annals of Surgical Oncology. Gresham et al noted...
In a study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Tammemägi et al assessed smoking cessation rates among participants undergoing chest x-ray or computed tomography (CT) screening for lung cancer in the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST). Among patients without a subsequent ...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a new indication for gadobutrol (Gadavist) injection for intravenous use with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the breast to assess the presence and extent of malignant breast disease. The approval is based on priority review of two multicenter...
Childhood and adolescent cancer survivors often face ongoing health problems that require frequent and long hospital stays many years after their cancer diagnosis and treatment, according to a new study by Kirchhoff et al published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. Survivors of...
Barbara L. McAneny, MD, a practicing oncologist from Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been re-elected to the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association (AMA) and will assume the position of Board Chair when the trustees gather for their first postelection meeting. Dr. McAneny, who has...
In the past 30 years, since mammography was introduced, late-stage breast cancer incidence has decreased by 37%, a new study published in Cancer has found. The analysis by Helvie et al took into account an observed underlying trend of increased breast cancer incidence present since the 1940s....
Weekly paclitaxel is used as second-line treatment in advanced gastric cancer, including HER2-positive disease, in Asian countries. In the phase III TyTAN trial in Asian patients reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Satoh et al assessed the addition of the anti-HER2 agent lapatinib...
A study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute by Stout et al suggests that the switch from film to digital mammography screening in the United States has produced a small health benefit at increased cost and with an increased false-positive rate. Biennial digital screening...
There may be significant genomic differences between patients with invasive lobular breast cancer and those with invasive ductal breast cancer, according to the results of a study presented by Sawyer et al in PLOS Genetics. This finding may lead to further insights into the biology of lobular...
Stopping statin therapy is safe for patients with cancer who have a life expectancy of less than 1 year, according to a randomized study reported at the 2014 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago (Abstract LBA9514). Discontinuing statins did not shorten survival and provided a number of important...
Adding goserelin (Zoladex) to standard chemotherapy may be an effective method of preserving fertility among women with early-stage hormone receptor–negative breast cancer, according to findings from a federally funded phase III clinical trial. In the S0230/POEMS study, reported at the 2014...
Introducing a palliative care support program for caregivers of patients with advanced cancer at or near the time patients are diagnosed provides greater benefits than delayed palliative care services, according to results of the ENABLE III study reported at the 2014 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago...
The use of radiotherapy for the index ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) may affect subsequent treatment of tumor recurrences and complications after breast-conserving surgery, reported Greenberg et al in the Annals of Surgical Oncology. Based on the results of this retrospective cohort study, the...
As reported in JAMA Ophthalmology, McCannel and colleagues identified three cases of subfoveal neurosensory retinal detachment among patients receiving MEK inhibitor therapy for metastatic cancer in clinical trials requiring ophthalmologic examination at their institution. In all cases, the toxic...
The androgen receptor inhibitor enzalutamide (Xtandi) has been shown to prolong survival in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer with progressive disease after chemotherapy. In the phase III PREVAIL trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Beer et al found that...
Findings from a phase III randomized study suggest that women with breast cancer and bone metastasis who have received at least nine doses of zoledronic acid over the previous year can safely scale back dosing from every 4 weeks to every 12 weeks without compromising the effectiveness of the...
According to a phase II study, customizing radiation doses based on response to induction chemotherapy and other prognostic factors may allow lower doses of radiation therapy to be administered to some patients with human papillomavirus (HPV)-positive oropharyngeal cancer without compromising...
A recently reported phase II trial indicated that maintenance therapy with the PARP inhibitor olaparib significantly improved progression-free survival vs placebo in patients with platinum-sensitive serous ovarian cancer. As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Ledermann et al, a preplanned...
The combination of lenalidomide (Revlimid) and rituximab (Rituxan) has shown synergistic activity in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) preclinical models. In a CLL Research Consortium phase II study of the combination in treatment-naive patients reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, James...
Concurrent treatment with ipilimumab (Yervoy) and nivolumab resulted in a 2-year survival rate of 79% for patients with advanced melanoma. “While this is a small trial, that is very impressive 2-year survival data,” noted Mario Sznol, MD, at a press briefing on progress in immunotherapy ...
Elevated circulating tumor cells are associated with poor prognosis in metastatic breast cancer. In the phase III Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG) S0500 trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Smerage et al assessed whether changing chemotherapy after one cycle of first-line treatment in ...
Findings from a large phase I study of 411 patients with advanced melanoma show that the PD-1–targeting antibody pembrolizumab (MK-3475) produced responses in 34% of patients, including 28% of patients whose disease progressed on prior treatment with ipilimumab (Yervoy). Among those who...
Adjuvant therapy with ipilimumab (Yervoy) for patients with high-risk stage III melanoma significantly improved recurrence-free survival, the primary endpoint of the phase III EORTC 18071/CA 184-029 study. Patients randomly assigned to receive ipilimumab had a 9-month absolute improvement in...
Around a quarter of smokers who carry a mutation in the BRCA2 gene will develop lung cancer at some point in their lifetime, a large-scale, international study reveals. Scientists described a previously unknown link between lung cancer and a particular BRCA2 mutation, which occurs in around 2% of...
In a Dutch population-based study reported in The Lancet Oncology, de Glas et al found that the Adjuvant! Online prediction tool performed poorly in older patients with early-stage breast cancer, significantly overestimating or underestimating overall survival depending on comorbidity...
Ibrutinib is an irreversible inhibitor of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase that was recently approved for treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients who have received at least one prior therapy. A small proportion of CLL patients have been observed to relapse during ibrutinib treatment, ...
The combination of two investigational oral drugs, the PARP inhibitor olaparib and the antiangiogenic drug cediranib, significantly extended progression-free survival and increased the overall response rate compared to olaparib alone in a phase II study among women with recurrent,...
A phase III, multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled study found that the oral targeted drug lenvatinib is highly effective among patients with differentiated thyroid cancer resistant to standard radioiodine therapy. “The main result is an extraordinary improvement in progression-free...
In a phase I study, ceritinib (Zykadia) was found to shrink tumors in patients with anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), regardless of whether patients had received previous treatment with an ALK inhibitor. The study was presented at the 2014 ASCO...
A large phase III study, ALTTO (Adjuvant Lapatinib and/or Trastuzumab Treatment Optimisation), found no statistically significant differences in 4-year disease-free survival among women with early HER2-positive breast cancer who received adjuvant treatment that combined the HER2-targeted drugs...
Bevacizumab (Avastin) plus chemotherapy and cetuximab (Erbitux) plus chemotherapy produced equal survival benefits for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer and no KRAS mutations, according to results from a large federally funded phase III study presented at the 2014 ASCO Annual Meeting...
The addition of docetaxel to androgen-deprivation therapy extended survival for men with newly diagnosed hormone-sensitive prostate cancer by more than 13 months in the National Cancer Institute–led phase III E3805 study. The survival benefit was even greater for men with high-volume disease. ...
A joint analysis of two phase III trials demonstrated that the aromatase inhibitor exemestane more effectively prevents breast cancer recurrences than tamoxifen when either was given with ovarian function suppression to premenopausal women with hormone-sensitive cancers. Exemestane plus ovarian...
In a long-term follow-up analysis of RTOG 9802, the addition of PCV (procarbazine [Matulane], lomustine [CeeNu], and vincristine) to radiotherapy prolonged both progression-free survival and overall survival in adult patients with low-grade glioma. The findings were reported at the 2014 ASCO Annual ...
Early findings from the phase III RESONATE study indicate that ibrutinib (Imbruvica) produces durable tumor responses and marked improvement in survival over standard ofatumumab (Arzerra) for patients with relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). “With ibrutinib, about 80% of patients...
Patients with stage IV non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who relapsed after initial platinum-based therapy experienced extended overall survival with a combination of the antiangiogenic agent ramucirumab (Cyramza) and standard chemotherapy with docetaxel, compared to patients receiving...
In a phase I study, the investigational anti–programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) monoclonal antibody MPDL3280A demonstrated promising overall response rates in patients with previously treated metastatic urothelial bladder cancer whose tumors were characterized as PD-L1–positive. The ...
An international, randomized phase III study found that replacing vincristine with bortezomib (Velcade) in R-CHOP (rituximab [Rituxan] plus cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, and prednisone) significantly improved outcomes in newly diagnosed patients with mantle cell lymphoma who were...
In a new study presented at the 2014 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago (Abstract 3516), researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center found patients with advanced colorectal cancer responded well to a combination therapy of the drugs vemurafenib (Zelboraf), cetuximab (Erbitux),...
The majority of women with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations experience sexual dysfunction, menopausal symptoms, cognitive and stress issues, and poor sleep following risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy, according to results of a new study from the Abramson Cancer Center and the Perelman School of Medicine ...
Men with prostate cancer generally have an excellent prognosis, but questions remain about the risk of second primary malignancies after initial therapy for localized disease. According to a new study presented at the 2014 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago (Abstract 5034), although the overall risk of ...
Oncologists now have a new understanding of the toxicity levels of specific chemotherapy regimens used for women with early-stage breast cancer, according to research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The retrospective study, reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Mandelblatt and colleagues attempted to determine whether cognitive impairment is present in older patients with breast cancer prior to systemic therapy. They found that although there were no global differences in cognitive function between...