Oncology Vol 27 No 12

Although the prospect is tempting, we do not believe there are sufficient grounds at this time to abandon bone marrow biopsy in patients with lymphoma. It still provides robust prognostic information, and in the majority of patients it remains an indispensable staging tool.

Clearly, eliminating a bone marrow biopsy in appropriate patients would be another step in the direction of minimizing the torture to which they are subjected.

The so-called “carryover” effect of tamoxifen results in the reduction in recurrence continuing well after treatment has stopped. The carryover effect is seen mostly in the first 5 years after treatment cessation, and recent evidence suggests that after that time, it is largely over.

In the future, we also need to improve our ability to personalize the duration of endocrine therapy, with a goal of optimizing patient selection for extended therapy. Hopefully, clinical-pathologic indices and predictive biomarkers similar to the Oncotype DX 12-gene recurrence score or the PAM50 risk of recurrence score for adjuvant chemotherapy will soon emerge to guide adjuvant endocrine therapy.

Despite the promise of proton therapy, comparative evidence has yet to definitively demonstrate its clinical benefit over other forms of contemporary radiation for prostate cancer.

A 76-year-old woman with a history of dementia, hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus, and newly diagnosed squamous cell carcinoma of the urinary bladder was referred to Indiana University Medical Center after 3 to 4 weeks of hospitalization at two other hospitals.

The strongest aspect of TCGA is that the data are publically available, fueling the input needed for unparalleled discovery. As the broader scientific community continues to analyze and integrate TCGA data with their own datasets, it is highly likely that breast cancer patients will benefit.

TCGA’s efforts to dissect the genomic complexity found in breast cancer patients represents only the beginning of a journey toward better understanding of the intricacy of the events that lead to this disease. Additional efforts are required to provide tailored and effective therapeutic interventions.

Because of challenges in making the correct diagnosis and the physician’s reluctance to administer chemotherapy for a disease characterized by such a low tumoral mass, patients may experience a delay in the initiation of appropriate treatment.

While the name POEMS (polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal gammopathy, and skin changes) provides a nice acronym for a collection of seemingly disparate features, the diagnosis does not require that all these elements be present, and many other features are not included.

Shortly after the rollout of the new healthcare exchanges, we asked the members of ONCOLOGY’s Editorial Board to share their impressions of what they were seeing-and what they expected to see-in terms of the effects of the ACA on practicing oncologists and their patients.

The development and approval of oncology therapeutics has been facilitated by the cooperation and coordination of regulatory practices between the EMA and the FDA. However, there continue to be important differences between the decisions of the two agencies.

POEMS syndrome is a rare paraneoplastic syndrome that is caused by an underlying plasma cell disorder. Its main features include polyradiculoneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal plasma cell disorder, and skin changes.

This article aims to provide an overview of The Cancer Genome Atlas findings, with a particular focus on their potential biological relevance and therapeutic implications.

New evidence now supports improved recurrence and breast cancer mortality outcomes with continued tamoxifen for up to 10 years in women of any age, and such long-duration therapy is especially important for women who remain premenopausal after their first 5 years of tamoxifen.

Can knowledge of a patient’s breast tumor genome help select the optimal treatment, and when we have an effective treatment for a group of patients-in this case, for breast cancer patients in the adjuvant setting-how long should the course of treatment be?