Patients with lower-risk myelodysplastic syndromes and anemia can derive long-term benefits from erythropoietin and myeloid growth factor hormones, according to a study in Blood.
In order for a new treatment modality to be considered efficacious, it needs to be evaluated by acceptable criteria and demonstrate an improvement on the natural course of the disease.
The Four Corners Breast Cancer Study is a population-based case-control study of women living in the southwestern states—Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah.
More is better, at least when it comes to treatments for multiple myeloma. Studies from Spanish and Italian investigators showed that upfront use of four drugs improves durable responses and progression-free survival in elderly patients.
The targeted combination of lapatinib (Tykerb) plus trastuzumab (Herceptin) led to a median overall survival of 14 months in women with refractory metastatic breast cancer.
A 30-year study of nearly 20,000 Danish women made a defensible connection between obesity and poor prognosis after breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Some believed the unraveling of the human genome would lead overnight to the genetic tweaking of errant cells and the tailoring of treatments to patients. That dream’s time has not yet come, even a decade after the human genome was first sequenced. But the scientific community has made enormous progress in developing tools to examine the genome and their application. And those efforts may soon lead to practical results for mainstream oncology.
The standard for delivering the best quality of care to breast cancer patients calls for surgeons to consult with other specialists and to provide resources and education to help patients decide their course of treatment. That doesn't mean they do it.
As many as one in four cancer patients develop metastatic cancers of the brain. Existing therapies seldom do more than slow the disease. Adding to the urgency to find a way to prevent brain metastasis is the increasing number of such cases.
Ultrasound elastography may be the link bridging the gap between suspicion and definitive proof, a noninvasive means to distinguish between benign and malignant tissue. The technology for doing so appeared some years ago at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America as an experimental curiosity. It’s been evolving since then until it appears now to have reached a clinical tipping point.
Precise and noninvasive, stereotactic radiosurgery is proving a godsend to some noncancer patients. Its use for applications outside oncology, such as the treatment of movement disorders, arteriovenous malformations, and neuralgia, have been around almost since the commercial introduction of this technology.
Oncology is gaining ground on several fronts, thanks in large part to increased sophistication in the technology of cancer therapeutics, but also in how those technologies are applied.
Dr. Otis W. Brawley took a courageous stand late last week, one he has taken many times before, but which had until then gone all but unnoticed. Responding to a Journal of the American Medical Association article detailing the scientific and medical limitations of breast and prostate screening, the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society acknowledged that “in the case of some screening for some cancers, modern medicine has overpromised.”
An analysis by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center shows that costs vary widely for different treatment regimens and from one delivery method to another. Yet receiving more treatments and spending extra on more sophisticated technology may do little good, at least when it comes to pain relief.
Freestanding and community-based cancer centers will be leading with their chins if the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services revises its reimbursement rules on equipment utilization.
They are supposed to be the standard bearers of the body’s defense against disease. But when it comes to cancer, some macrophages are traitors, helping rather than fighting the enemy. They attach to metastatic tumor cells, as they do to other threats. But rather than destroying metastatic cells, these macrophages enable their growth.
For the third time in less than a year, results from a retrospective study of breast cancer cases were framed as new research, challenging the routine use of MRI as a means to improve surgical outcomes in newly diagnosed breast cancer patients. The results, announced in press releases in fall last year and twice this summer, bear repeating, said the principal author of the study, Richard J. Bleicher, co-director of the breast fellowship program at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.
For every 1000 women aged 40 to 74 years who participated in screening, 3.9 diagnosed with breast cancer died compared with 5.0 among those who did not participate. The absolute benefit in terms of reduced deaths due to mammography screening, therefore, is about one in 1000.
Oncologists remain largely satisfied with their career choice, with 85% expressing satisfaction and 82% of that group saying they would recommend their specialty to a medical student, according to a survey conducted by Epocrates, a provider of online clinical decision support tools for mobile and desktop devices.
