Tag Archives: memorial

FDG-PET/CT shows promise for breast cancer patients younger than 40

Assessing if and how far breast cancer has spread throughout the body is what doctor’s refer to as staging. Most women nowadays are diagnosed at earlier stages, meaning stage 1 or 2 of possible 4 stages (stated Christopher Riedl, MD). Current National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines consider systemic FDG-PET/CT staging for only stage III breast cancer patients. …

Genetic cause of childhood leukemia identified

"We’re in uncharted territory," said study author Kenneth Offit, MD, MPH, Chief of the Clinical Genetics Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. "At the very least this discovery gives us a new window into inherited causes of childhood leukemia. More immediately, testing for this mutation may allow affected families to prevent leukemia in future generations." The mutation was first observed in a family treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering of which several family members of different generations had been diagnosed with childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). A second, non-related, leukemia-prone family cared for at a different hospital was later found to have the same mutation…

New therapy shown to improve progression-free survival and shrink tumors in rare cancer for the first time

The findings are potentially practice-changing for a historically "untreatable disease." Though uveal melanoma is rare — there are only 2,500 cases diagnosed in the United States each year — about half of patients will develop metastatic disease, and survival for patients with advanced disease has held steady at nine months to a year for decades. Researchers found that progression-free survival (PFS) in patients receiving selumetinib was nearly 16 weeks and 50 percent of these patients experienced tumor shrinkage, with 15 percent achieving major shrinkage. Patients receiving temozolomide, the current standard chemotherapy, had seven weeks of PFS and no tumor shrinkage. …