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Showing 5001 - 5050Radiation-sparing Dose-adjusted EPOCH-Rituximab for Primary Mediastinal B-cell Lymphoma
Tumor control is frequently not achieved with standard immunochemotherapy in patients with primary mediastinal B-cell lymphoma, requiring consolidation with mediastinal radiotherapy. However, radiotherapy is associated with serious late adverse effects and is still associated with disease...
Practice-changing Study Shows Survival Benefit for Antiangiogenesis in Advanced Cervical Cancer
The addition of bevacizumab (Avastin) to chemotherapy prolongs overall survival in women with metastatic cervical cancer compared with chemotherapy alone, according to the results of a randomized phase III study presented at the Plenary Session of the ASCO Annual Meeting.1 Women on the...
It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again
Yogi Berra offered the comment “It’s déjà vu all over again” when he witnessed Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hitting back-to-back home runs in the early 1960s. His pithy remark neatly summarizes my reaction when I read the article, “Dose-Adjusted EPOCH-Rituximab Therapy in Primary...
Shiitake Mushroom
The use of dietary supplements by patients with cancer has increased significantly over the past 2 decades despite insufficient evidence of safety and effectiveness. Finding reliable sources of information about dietary supplements can be daunting. Patients typically rely on family, friends, and...
'Spectacular' Results with Immunotherapies in Melanoma Galvanize the Oncology Community
In the News focuses on media reports that your patients may have questions about at their next visit. This continuing column will provide summaries of articles in the popular press that may prompt such questions, as well as comments from colleagues in the field. Much of the news about immunotherapy ...
SEER Analysis Shows Increased Survival with Surgery and Radiation Therapy in Metastatic Gastric Cancer
A Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database analysis reported by Ravi Shridhar, MD, PhD, and colleagues in Cancer indicates that patients receiving surgery and radiation therapy for metastatic gastric cancer have prolonged survival compared with those receiving either alone or...
Study Shows HPV Vaccine Reduced Rate of Infection in Teenage Girls by 56%
A new government study investigating the prevalence of human papillomavirus (HPV) infections in females aged 14 to 59 before and after the introduction in 2006 of the HPV vaccine found that the rate of the HPV infection dropped by 56%, decreasing from 11.5% in 2006 to 5.1% in 2010 among female...
Measurement of Circulating Tumor DNA Shows Promise in Monitoring Metastatic Breast Cancer
Management of metastatic breast cancer requires monitoring of tumor burden to assess response to treatment, and there is a need for biomarkers that can measure tumor burden with high sensitivity and specificity. Assays measuring serum cancer antigen (CA) 15-3 and circulating tumor cells have been...
2013 Breast Cancer Symposium to Offer Expanded Meet the Professor Sessions and New Fellows, Residents, and Junior Faculty Track
As a cancer care specialist, it can be easy to become hyperfocused on your area of expertise within your subspecialty. But that’s exactly what ASCO wants its members—in all specialties—to avoid. The theme of this year’s Breast Cancer Symposium—Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Clinical...
Molecular Landscaping of Acute Myeloid Leukemia: Are We Relearning the Past or Informing the Future?
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a clinically and molecularly heterogeneous disease.1 This concept has been supported by more than 4 decades of studies showing distinct outcomes of subsets of patients that differ in age, disease type (primary vs secondary vs therapy-related), and cytogenetic and...
Venous Thromboembolism in Patients with Cancer: Real-world Challenges for the Practicing Oncologist
The close association between cancer and thrombosis has been recognized now for more than 150 years.1 Not only is it now known that patients with cancer are at substantially increased risk of developing venous thromboembolism, even prior to the diagnosis of cancer, but the association between...
SIDEBAR: Venous Thromboembolism Expert Panel
Gary H. Lyman, MD, MPH, FRCP (Edin), Co-Chair, Duke University Medical Center Anna Falanga, MD, Co-Chair, Ospedali Riuiniti Bergamo, Italy Daniel Clarke-Pearson, MD, University of North Carolina Christopher Flowers, MD, MS, Winship Cancer Institute Charles W. Francis, MD, University of...
Two New Genetic Tests Offer Progress in Personalized Medicine for Newly Diagnosed Prostate Cancer
At least 12 different genetic tests for prostate cancer are under development. The two tests currently available are Oncotype DX (Genomic Health, Redwood City, California) and Prolaris (Myriad Genetic Laboratories, Salt Lake City). Both tests can identify which low-risk patients are “truly” at low...
Idelalisib, Obinutuzumab Show Encouraging Results in CLL Studies
A trio of presentations at the ASCO Annual Meeting focused on two promising investigational drugs for the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). These two drugs—idelalisib and obinutuzumab—join a list of new approaches showing potential. Idelalisib Alone A phase I dose-ranging study of...
First Positive Trial of Heat Shock Protein 90 Inhibitor in Lung Cancer That Has Progressed after First-line Therapy
The investigational heat shock protein (Hsp)90 inhibitor ganetespib plus docetaxel extended overall survival compared with docetaxel alone as second-line therapy in patients with advanced non–small cell adenocarcinoma of the lung that had progressed on first-line therapy in the randomized phase II...
Supreme Court Rules Human Genes May Not Be Patented
On June 13, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that isolated human genes may not be patented. However, the creation of synthetic forms of DNA, known as complementary DNA (cDNA), is eligible for patent protection. The decision resolves the question brought before the Supreme Court justices in...
Management of Anaplastic Oligodendroglial Tumors
Pearls in Neuro-oncology is guest edited by Tracy Batchelor, MD, Director, Division of Neuro-Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, Boston. The series is intended to provide the practicing oncologist with guidance in managing...
Just Say 'Know'
In 1989, Denardo and associates reported the results of intensive care unit (ICU) therapy in a series of patients who developed acute respiratory failure and required mechanical ventilation after bone marrow transplantation. Of those on mechanical ventilatory support longer than 4 days, not one...
New Research Presented in Breast, Gastric, Esophageal Cancers, Melanoma, and Multiple Myeloma, plus Supportive Care
Attendees at the ASCO Annual Meeting are faced with a major challenge of trying to attend as many important sessions as they can over a 4-day period. Our challenge is to feature the major news in The ASCO Post. In addition to our regular comprehensive coverage of key presentations, the following...
New Research on Combination Chemotherapy, Prognostic Biomarkers, and PET-guided Radiation Therapy in B-cell Malignancies
The 12th International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma was held June 19-22, 2013, in Lugano, Switzerland. Over 3,000 hematologists, clinical oncologists, pathologists, and leading researchers attended the meeting, which featured new research on B-cell malignancies, follicular lymphoma, as well as...
Expert Point of View: Charles Vogel, MD, Larry Norton, MD, and Andrew D. Seidman, MD
A number of breast cancer specialists commented on the value of the Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG) 0221 data. Charles Vogel, MD, Professor of Medicine at the University of Miami Health System, commented after the presentation, “This is a potentially important abstract because of the wide variety...
Why Is Stem Cell Transplant So Underused in Follicular Lymphoma?
Follicular lymphoma is the second most common subtype of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in the United States. Of the nearly 70,000 new cases of NHL anticipated in 2013,1 approximately 7,000 to 13,000 (10%–19%) will be follicular lymphoma, by recent estimates.2-5 For many years, the median overall...
Some Successes, Some Failures Reported in Research and Treatment of Pancreatic Cancer
The challenge of treating pancreatic cancer inched forward with studies reported at the 2013 ASCO Annual Meeting, though some important studies proved disappointing. Nab-paclitaxel Improves Overall Survival In treatment-naive metastatic patients, the addition of nanoparticle albumin-bound...
Déjà Vu Redux: Lessons from the SWOG-8516 Study in Aggressive Lymphomas
Joseph M. Connors, MD, authored a commentary in the June 25 issue of The ASCO Post inspired by a recent New England Journal of Medicine publication on dose-adjusted EPOCH-R chemotherapy (etoposide, prednisone, vincristine, cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, and rituximab) for primary mediastinal B-cell ...
Nazarbayev University Selects Pittsburgh School of Medicine as Strategic Partner to Establish Medical School in Kazakhstan
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has been chosen to guide the Republic of Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University as it establishes its own medical school, which aims to educate physician-scientists to become the nation’s next leaders in health care, medical education and biomedical...
10th International Conference of the Society for Integrative Oncology Will Explore Translational Science Topics
This October for 3 full days (October 20–22) in Vancouver, Canada, oncologists, scientists, and other oncology health professionals will gather for the Society for Integrative Oncology Annual Meeting. This year’s conference theme is Translational Science in Integrative Oncology: From Bedside, to...
NIH Commits $24 Million Annually for Big Data Centers of Excellence
The National Institutes of Health will fund up to $24 million per year for 4 years to establish six to eight investigator-initiated Big Data to Knowledge Centers of Excellence. The centers will improve the ability of the research community to use increasingly large and complex datasets through the...
Acupuncture May Reduce Arm Lymphedema in Patients with Breast Cancer
Integrative Oncology is guest edited by Barrie R. Cassileth, MS, PhD, Chief of the Integrative Medicine Service and Laurance S. Rockefeller Chair in Integrative Medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York. The Integrative Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center...
SIDEBAR: Key Issues in Joint Commission Statement by American Psychosocial Oncology Society, Association of Oncology Social Work, and Oncology Nursing Society
It is imperative that [Commission on Cancer]-accredited programs adopt a universal definition of distress. We concur with the National Comprehensive Cancer Network definition of distress as an “unpleasant emotional experience of a psychological (cognitive, behavioral, emotional), social, and/or...
Intercalated Chemotherapy/Erlotinib Improves Progression-free Survival in Advanced NSCLC
EGFR mutation status may not be known at the time treatment is started in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Further, some data suggest that the efficacy of concurrent treatment with an EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor and chemotherapy is reduced because the G1 cell-cycle...
Program Aims to Overcome Barriers to Early Cancer Care in Colombia
According to a report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s GLOBOCAN project, one woman dies every minute from breast cancer and one woman dies every 2 minutes from cervical cancer.1 The majority of these deaths occur in developing countries, where access to health care is limited ...
Is Age Truly Relative in HER2-Positive Breast Cancer?
Breast cancer arising in younger women has increasingly become the subject of intense study, and often debate, over the past decade. Retrospective studies have illustrated that breast cancer in young women is more commonly an aggressive subtype (ie, triple-negative/basal-like, HER2-enriched),...
Age Not Linked to Recurrence in Observation or Trastuzumab Groups with HER2-positive Breast Cancer
Available data suggest that younger age is an independent risk factor for disease recurrence and death in women with breast cancer. However, there has not been adequate study of the interaction of age with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) status or anti-HER2 treatment. In an analysis ...
ASCO Studies Support Limited Use of 'Routine' Imaging
The overuse of imaging in oncology workup and surveillance is a timely concern, as health-care dollars shrink and the risk for second malignancies becomes clearer. At this year’s ASCO Annual Meeting, several studies showed that although many routine imaging studies may be unnecessary, physicians...
Targeted Suppression of a Reactivated Developmental Pathway in Hepatocellular Cancer
This issue of The ASCO Post summarizes the results of an important study recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine by Yong and colleagues. As outlined, investigators from the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine have identified re-expression of SALL4 as a ...
Evolving Issues in Low-dose CT Lung Cancer Screening
Over a decade has passed since the start of the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial and more than 2 years since the first report indicating that this randomized study had demonstrated a significant reduction in lung cancer mortality with low-dose computed tomography (CT) screening.1 That favorable ...
PET/CT Superior to Bone Marrow Biopsy for Diagnosis, Prognosis in Lymphoma
A more precise method for determining bone marrow involvement in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma has been identified by researchers in a study published recently in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine.1 Imaging with 18F–fluorodeoxyglucose positron-emission tomography/computed tomography...
Ibrutinib Produces High Response Rate in Patients with Refractory Mantle Cell Lymphoma
Ibrutinib is a first-in-class oral covalent inhibitor of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, a mediator of the B cell-receptor signaling pathway implicated in the pathogenesis of B-cell cancers. As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Michael L. Wang, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson...
B-cell Receptor Signaling Inhibitors Moving Forward in Lymphoma
Though still in early-phase studies, novel B-cell receptor signaling inhibitors look very promising for the treatment of lymphoma, according to reports from the 2013 ASCO Annual Meeting. Idelalisib in Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma In non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), idelalisib looked impressive as both a single...
Expert Point of View: Jonathan S. Berek, MD
The CHORUS trial had similar results to the previous European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) 55971 study, showing noninferiority for primary debulking surgery followed by chemotherapy vs neoadjuvant chemotherapy followed by surgery and additional chemotherapy, said formal ...
Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy and Interval Debulking May Be Appropriate for Some Patients With Poor Performance Status Advanced Ovarian Cancer
Patients with newly diagnosed advanced ovarian cancer—especially patients with poor performance status—appear to derive benefits from neoadjuvant chemotherapy followed by surgery vs primary surgery followed by chemotherapy, according to results of the Medical Research Council (MRC) CHORUS trial. In ...
Expert Point of View: Jonathan S. Berek, MD
Weekly vs every-3-week therapy is a somewhat controversial area in ovarian cancer, said formal discussant of the MITO-7 trial, Jonathan S. Berek, MD, Director of the Stanford Women’s Cancer Center, Palo Alto, California. “[Japan Clinical Oncology Group (JCOG)]-16 showed a survival advantage for...
Weekly Carboplatin/Paclitaxel Improves Quality of Life, Toxicity vs Every-3-week Regimen in Advanced Ovarian Cancer
Patients with advanced ovarian cancer have similar survival outcomes thus far with a weekly regimen of carboplatin/paclitaxel vs the standard every-3-week regimen, but the weekly regimen is much better tolerated with improved quality of life, according to final results of the Multicenter Italian...
Oncologists Speak Out Against the High Cost of Cancer Drugs
That the United States spends twice as much on health care than other industrialized countries—about $2.8 trillion in 2012—without reaping appreciably better outcomes1 is not news. The topic has been dissected on the front pages of leading newspapers for years and was the subject of the entire...
Active Surveillance of Very Low-Risk Prostate Cancer Might Not Be Suitable Option for African American Men
African American men with prostate cancer that meets current criteria for very low-risk disease might actually be harboring larger and more aggressive tumors that make active surveillance a less viable option, according to the results of a study published online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology1 ...
Ginseng
Guest Editor Integrative Oncology is guest edited by Barrie R. Cassileth, MS, PhD, Chief of the Integrative Medicine Service and Laurance S. Rockefeller Chair in Integrative Medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York. The Integrative Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering...
ASH Announces 2013 Honorific Award Recipients
The American Society of Hematology (ASH) announced the seven scientists who have received 2013 Honorific Awards for their significant contributions to the understanding and treatment of hematologic diseases. The Honorific Awards are the Society’s most prestigious awards. This year’s awards will be...
Legislative Endorsement Update From ASCO
ASCO recently announced its endorsement of the Tobacco Tax Equity Act of 2014 (S. 194), which would close tax loopholes that allow tobacco companies to avoid the federal cigarette tax by making taxes on pipe tobacco equivalent to cigarette tobacco. “Raising tobacco taxes is one of the most...
Enhanced Treatment, Surveillance Needed for Patients With BRAF-Mutant Melanoma to Prevent Secondary Cancers
Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center suggest secondary cancers seen in melanoma patients who are being treated for a BRAF gene mutation may require new strategies, such as enhanced surveillance and combining BRAF inhibitor therapy with other inhibitors, especially as they become more widely used....
Can Obinutuzumab Benefit Patients With Rituximab-Refractory Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma?
Obinutuzumab is a glycoengineered type II antibody that differs from type I anti-CD20 antibodies by being associated with actin reorganization and adhesion followed by direct cell death.1 Obinutuzumab has been glycoengineered by reduction in fucose content of the Fc region, which increases its...
