Tag Archives: study

Pain drugs used in prostate gland removal linked to cancer outcome, study finds

The immune system’s strength is especially important in cancer surgery because surgical manipulation of a tumor may spread cancer cells. The immune system can be impaired by general anesthesia, the overall stress surgery places on the body and by post-surgical systemic opioid use. The study found better outcomes in radical prostatectomy patients who had general anesthesia supplemented with spinal or epidural delivery of a long-acting opioid such as morphine, than in those who received general anesthesia only. …

Patients with metastatic breast cancer may not benefit from surgery and radiation after chemotherapy

"There is a small percentage, about 5 to 20 percent of breast cancer patients, who present with metastatic breast cancer when they see their doctors for the first time, and across the globe, the thought is that the local tumor in such events does not require any surgery or radiation [known as loco-regional treatment (LRT)] after chemotherapy, unless there is bleeding or ulceration," said Rajendra Badwe, M.D., director of the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, India. "However, there are conflicting results from retrospective analyses, and hence, there was a need for a randomized trial…

Antihormone therapy anastrozole may provide new option for breast cancer prevention

About 80 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States each year have tumors with high levels of hormone receptors. These tumors are fueled by the hormone estrogen. Anastrozole is a drug that prevents the body from making estrogen, and it has been used to treat postmenopausal women with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer for more than 10 years. "We initiated the International Breast Cancer Intervention Study II (IBIS-II) Prevention trial to investigate whether anastrozole can be used effectively to prevent breast cancer," said Jack Cuzick, Ph.D., chairman of the IBIS-II Steering Committee. …

Changing chemo not beneficial for metastatic breast cancer patients with elevated circulating tumor cells

"We concluded that CTCs are not a good marker in helping to decide when to switch between chemotherapies," said Jeffrey B. Smerage, M.D., Ph.D., clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center in Ann Arbor. "It had been hoped that switching would both increase the chances of being on an effective therapy and decrease the exposure to toxicity from less effective or ineffective therapies, and as a result it had been hoped that this early switching would result in improved survival and time to progression. "The most important implication is that we have validated that the group of patients with elevated CTCs at both baseline and 21 days [after starting their first chemotherapy] has a worse prognosis with regard to both time to progression and overall survival," added Smerage…

Evidence of savings in accountable care organizations, cancer care

Researchers from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice report that savings may be found in accountable care organizations (ACO) through reductions in hospitalizations. The analysis published in the December issue of the journal Healthcare provides the first empirical evidence on how the shared savings ACO model may affect the cost and experience of care for cancer patients. The researchers looked at the Physician Group Practice Demonstration, which ran from 2005 to 2010 in 10 physician groups, for the best current evidence on the likely effectiveness of accountable care organizations for Medicare beneficiaries…

First in-human trial of endoxifen shows promise as breast cancer treatment

"We achieved up to 60 fold higher levels of endoxifen compared to endoxifen levels achieved with the standard dose of tamoxifen," says Matthew Goetz, M.D., a Mayo Clinic oncologist and lead author of the study. "We have seen evidence for tumor regression in patients who had failed standard hormonal therapies including aromatase inhibitors, fulvestrant and tamoxifen. This is an exciting first step in the development of this drug." Tamoxifen is a hormonal therapy that has been used for over 40 years to reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence and to prevent breast cancer. …

Childhood cancer survivors suffer long-term symptoms linked to poor quality of life

"The prevalence of these symptoms accounts for a huge variance in physical, mental and social domains of quality of life among survivors," said I-Chan Huang, Ph.D., an associate professor of health outcomes and policy in the UF College of Medicine and the lead author of the study. "If we think symptoms are the key to patients’ quality of life, then if we can better manage their symptoms, we can improve their daily functional status and quality of life." Huang, also a member of UF’s Institute for Child Health Policy, teamed with researchers from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis to conduct the study, which was published in the Nov. 20 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology…

Systems medicine paves way for improved treatment for leukemia patients

A multi-disciplinary team of researchers at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland, FIMM, and the Helsinki University Central Hospital has developed a novel individualized systems medicine (ISM) strategy which enables selection of potentially effective cancer therapies for individual patients. Furthermore, this strategy helps in understanding and predicting drug resistance and may pave a path for individualized optimization of patient therapies in the clinic for various types of cancers. Many novel targeted drugs have been introduced to the clinic for cancer therapy, often guided by genomic clues on disease pathogenesis. Clinical treatment of cancer patients is, however, challenged by the fact that genomics is often not informative in selecting therapies to individual patients…

Drug-antibody pair has promising activity in non-Hodgkin lymphoma

The ongoing open-label phase 2 study presented at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting was designed to test the activity of brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) in relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) including B-cell cancers such as diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL). The antibody-toxin compound has been approved for treatment of relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma and anaplastic T cell lymphoma, and its success prompted the trial in NHL, said Eric Jacobsen, MD, of Dana-Farber, senior author of the study. First author is Nancy Bartlett, MD, of Washington University School of Medicine. …