Tag Archives: nsclc

Concurrent chemoradiation treatment at high-volume facilities improves survival for NSCLC

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer related death in the US with 159,000 deaths and 224,000 diagnoses each year, with NSCLC accounting for 85% of the cases. The stage of lung cancer is determined based on the size of the tumor, the extent and location of lymph node involvement, and whether or not the tumor has metastasized to distant regions. Approximately one quarter of NSCLC cases are diagnosed at stage III, with only 25% of those patients surviving at least 5 years. …

Customizing chemotherapy in lung cancer: New phase II data reported

In a randomized phase II study, researchers showed that patients whose lung cancers expressed low levels of an enzyme called thymidylate synthase experienced a greater benefit from treatment with the combination of pemetrexed and cisplatin than those whose tumours expressed high levels. “Thymidylate synthase is one of the proteins that is targeted by pemetrexed which is the most widely used chemotherapeutic regimen in the treatment of non-squamous NSCLC,” explains study author Professor Myung-Ju Ahn, from the Section of Hematology-Oncology at Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Korea. “In this study, we tried to evaluate whether expression of thymidylate synthase is a predictive factor for response to pemetrexed plus cisplatin chemotherapy compared with gemcitabine plus cisplatin in non-squamous cell lung cancer patients.” In terms of response rate and progression-free survival, the clinical benefits of the pemetrexed combination compared to other regimen were more prominent in those patients who expressed low levels of the molecule, Ahn said…

Patients who never smoked or who quit smoking have lower risk of developing secondary cancers

The analysis studied the association between patients’ smoking histories and their risks of developing SPLC, which is defined as a new lung cancer unrelated to the initial tumor based on histology and location in the lung. The study analyzed 1,484 patients (372 current smokers, 1,014 former smokers and 98 never smokers) who underwent surgery, with or without adjuvant chemotherapy or radiation therapy, for stage I-IIIA NSCLC at Duke University Medical Center between 1995 and 2008. Baseline covariates and oncologic outcomes including local control (LC), development of distant metastases (DM), overall survival (OS) and rates of SPLC were assessed. …

Five radiation oncology treatments to question — ScienceDaily

• Don’t recommend radiation following hysterectomy for endometrial cancer patients with low-risk disease. Patients with low-risk endometrial cancer, including no residual disease in hysterectomy despite positive biopsy, grade 1 or 2 with <50 percent myometrial invasion and no additional high-risk features such as age >60, lymphovascular space invasion or cervical involvement have a very low risk of recurrence following surgery. …

Five radiation oncology treatments to question

• Don’t recommend radiation following hysterectomy for endometrial cancer patients with low-risk disease. Patients with low-risk endometrial cancer, including no residual disease in hysterectomy despite positive biopsy, grade 1 or 2 with <50 percent myometrial invasion and no additional high-risk features such as age >60, lymphovascular space invasion or cervical involvement have a very low risk of recurrence following surgery. Meta-analysis studies of radiation therapy for low-risk endometrial cancer demonstrate increased side effects with no benefit in overall survival compared with surgery alone. • Don’t routinely offer radiation therapy for patients who have resected non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), negative margins, N0-1 disease…

High concordance between EGFR mutations from circulating-free tumor DNA and tumor tissue in non-small cell lung cancer

EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) therapy is approved for EGFR activating mutation positive patients with advanced NSCLC, but the standard for determining mutation status is with DNA derived directly from tumor tissue, which can be limited or not available. …

Deletion predicts survival in advanced non-small cell lung cancer

The BIM protein can activate the programmed cell death also known as the apoptotic pathway in cells. BIM deletion has been detected in 12.8% of the Asian population but is very rarely observed in the Caucasian population. All NSCLC patients treated with any therapy, targeted or chemotherapeutic, ultimately fail their therapy but at varying times. …