Although pharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (PSCC) is a rather rare disease, its incidence has been increasing over the past three decades, now accounting for 130,000 new cases and 80,000 cancer deaths worldwide. The prognosis is one of the poorest of all the head and neck squamous cell carcinomas and it has not improved to any significant extent, despite the availability of multimodal therapies. …
Assessing if and how far breast cancer has spread throughout the body is what doctor’s refer to as staging. …
When lung cancer has spread from an original tumor to other sites of the body, it is classified as metastatic (Stage IV), and the goal of treatment is to slow the cancer down with chemotherapy or radiation, but these treatments are unable to eradicate the cancer and survival is usually in the range of only a few months. However, when there are only a few locations of metastatic lung cancer (called oligo-metastatic), some studies suggest that by removing or eradicating each of those cancer deposits with aggressive treatments such as surgery or high-dose, precise radiation called stereotactic ablative radiotherapy or SABR, the cancer may be controlled for a long period of time. In order to further study the possible benefits of aggressive treatments in stage IV lung cancer, researchers completed this meta-analysis which evaluated data of 757 Stage IV NSCLC patients from 20 hospitals worldwide who had between one and five metastatic deposits that were removed surgically or eradicated with high-dose, precise radiotherapy. Patients in the study also had to have had aggressive treatment of their original lung tumor…
Researchers evaluated clinical features and survival outcomes among 41,502 patients diagnosed with stage I and II Hodgkin’s Disease from 1998 to 2011 from a prospectively collected database — the National Cancer Data Base (NCDB), which is composed of cases from 1,500 sites and represents >75 percent of all cancers diagnosed in the U.S. The average patient age was 37 (range: 18 — 90), with a median follow-up of 7.5 years. The association between RT use, co-variables and outcome were assessed in a multivariate Cox proportional hazards model…
The research, presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) International Congress in Munich, suggests that testing the temperature of breath could be a simple and noninvasive method to either confirm or reject the presence of lung cancer. Many research teams have been looking at the possibility of using breath tests for a number of cancers. This is the first study looking at breath temperature as a marker in lung cancer. The researchers enrolled 82 people in the study who had been referred for a full diagnostic test after an x-ray suggested the presence of lung cancer…
“Impact of the Addition of Carboplatin and/or Bevacizumab to Neoadjuvant Once-Per-Week Paclitaxel Followed by Dose-Dense Doxorubicin and Cyclophosphamide on Pathologic Complete Response Rates in Stage II to III Triple-Negative Breast Cancer: CALGB 40603 (Alliance)” was accepted as a rapid publication and published online this month by the Journal of Clinical Oncology. It will come out in print in September. Because of its rapid growth rate, many women with triple-negative breast cancer receive chemotherapy to try to shrink it before undergoing surgery. With the standard treatment, the cancer is eliminated from the breast and lymph nodes in the armpit before surgery in about one third of women…
The study findings defy the conventional belief that the two treatment interventions offer equal survival, and show the need to revisit some standards of breast cancer practice in the modern era. The research was presented at the 2014 Breast Cancer Symposium by Catherine Parker, MD, formerly a fellow at MD Anderson, now at the University of Alabama Birmingham. In the 1980s, both US-based and international randomized clinical studies found that BCT and mastectomy offered women with early stage breast cancer equal survival benefit…
Duke University assistant professor Emily Derbyshire and colleagues identified more than 30 enzyme-blocking molecules, called protein kinase inhibitors, that curb malaria before symptoms start. By focusing on treatments that act early, before a person is infected and feels sick, the researchers hope to give malaria — especially drug-resistant strains — less time to spread. The findings appear online and are scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal ChemBioChem. Malaria is caused by a single-celled parasite called Plasmodium that spreads from person to person through mosquito bites. …
With a new technique, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have established a new strategy to help surgeons see the entire tumor in the patient, increasing the likelihood of a positive outcome. This approach relies on an injectable dye that accumulates in cancerous tissues much more so than normal tissues…
Looking back at medical records from more than 58,000 women, Fox Chase’s Angela Jain, MD, Medical Oncologist and co-investigator Elizabeth Handorf, PhD, member of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Facility, found that only 8.94% received chemotherapy before ovarian cancer surgery in 1998; by 2011, that figure had increased to 26.72%. …