Cancer

Women with predominant type 1 and no type 3 lobules had a lower risk of breast cancer compared with those with no type 1 lobules or with mixed lobule types, and this finding was apparent for all histologic categories of benign breast disease. These results indicated that lobule type may be an important marker of breast cancer risk in women with benign breast disease.

There are several factors to consider when making treatment decisions relating to chemotherapy regimens for patients with colorectal cancer. Although capecitabine may be associated with a higher unit acquisition cost in patients with colorectal cancer, the current retrospective analysis of claims databases indicated that a lower cost was associated with oral capecitabine over intravenous 5-fluorouracil.

In this study, the authors observed that cancer patient information seeking was related to the adoption of novel targeted therapy for colon cancer in both appropriate and inappropriate clinical settings. These findings emphasize the importance of exploring patient influence on physician prescribing patterns and understanding the impact of information seeking on cancer outcomes.

Trends in stage at diagnosis, grade at diagnosis, and survival for urothelial carcinoma were analyzed in the National Cancer Data Base between 1993 and 2005. Renal pelvis and ureteral carcinoma showed a slight stage migration. The proportion of high grade tumors increased. No significant change in survival was observed.

The authors investigated carbonic anhydrase IX (CAIX) expression in 340 patients with urothelial carcinoma of the bladder. CAIX was expressed differentially in noninvasive versus invasive bladder cancer, in low-grade versus high-grade bladder cancer, and in the primary tumor versus metastasis. CAIX was identified as a strong predictor of recurrence, progression, and overall survival in patients with bladder cancer, and the integration of CAIX expression into conventional prognostic models significantly improved their predictive accuracy. The results suggested a tripartite role of CAIX as a diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic molecular marker in bladder cancer.

In the current study, a unique algorithm was developed to assist in predicting nonorgan-confined disease in patients with muscle-invasive urothelial carcinoma. The newly devised formula was 85% accurate, and the findings were internally validated.

Relative to partial nephrectomy (PN), radical nephrectomy predisposes to an increase in overall mortality and non-cancer-related death rate in patients with T1a renal cell carcinoma. In consequence, PN should be attempted whenever technically feasible. Selective referrals should be considered if PN expertise is unavailable.

Data regarding patients with ovarian cancer who underwent surgery and chemotherapy were evaluated. No self-reported toxicities were found to be more common among patients aged ≥80 years. However, only 57% of patients aged ≥80 years completed planned chemotherapy.

The objective of the current study was to assess the impact of perioperative transfusion on the prognosis of patients who underwent complete resection of oral squamous cell carcinoma and reconstruction by microvascular flaps. In multivariate analysis, transfusion was not found to have an adverse effect on overall survival, whereas age and American Society of Anesthesiologists class evolved as the strongest predictors of overall survival.

This study confirmed that tumor thickness was a strong predictor for cervical lymph-node involvement in oral cavity cancer. The optimal cutoff point for elective neck management was 4 mm.

Overexpression of the cyclooxygenase-2 gene (COX-2) is observed frequently in oral premalignant lesions (OPLs) and oral cancers, suggesting that this gene may play an important role in the progression of oral cancer. The results of this study provide the first epidemiologic evidence indicating that potentially functional polymorphisms of the COX-2 gene may have an impact on individual susceptibility to OPLs.

The authors investigated centromere protein H (CENP-H) expression as a prognostic biomarker for patients with lung cancer. The results indicated that high CENP-H protein expression was related to poor outcome in patients with nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and that CENP-H might be used as a prognostic biomarker for patients with lung cancer, especially those with early-stage NSCLC.

A prognostic model based on clinical parameters for nonsmall cell lung cancer patients treated with gefitinib as a salvage therapy was investigated. This prognostic model was based on easily available clinical variables and would be useful to identify patients who might derive more benefit from gefitinib treatment.

This comprehensive, population-based description of osteosarcoma identified important differences in incidence, survival, pathologic subtype, and anatomic site among age groups and quantified the impact of osteosarcoma in Paget disease or as a second cancer on incidence and mortality rates. These findings may have implications for understanding the biology and epidemiology of osteosarcoma.

Panitumumab monotherapy was found to be active in patients with heavily pretreated metastatic colorectal cancer. Although some degree of skin toxicity was seen in most patients, better clinical outcomes including progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival, and health-related quality of life were associated with more severe skin toxicities; these associations for PFS were pronounced in patients with wild-type KRAS tumors.

There is no consensus regarding the optimal method for the intraoperative evaluation of sentinel lymph nodes (SLNs) in breast cancer. In this study, the authors prospectively compared touch imprint cytology with frozen section analysis and rapid cytokeratin immunostaining of SLNs for intraoperative evaluation of disease and compared the results with those produced by final pathologic examination.

The limited antioxidative capacity of the fetus renders it more susceptible to reactive oxygen species (ROS) and possibly to ROS-mediated cancer initiation or promotion in utero. The tissue-selective increase in fetal vitamin E (VE) levels and reduced DNA oxidation, together with a concomitant reduction in postnatal tumorigenesis, suggest that in utero oxidative stress contributes to some postnatal cancers, and the risk can be reduced by maternal dietary supplementation with low-dose VE.

This study evaluated loss of heterozygosity of chromosome 1q21–23 in pretreatment esophageal biopsy specimens from 33 patients with locally advanced esophageal adenocarcinoma, who were treated with preoperative neoadjuvant therapy followed by surgery. Allelic loss with any marker was seen in 66% tumors, of 1q21 in 58% tumors, and 1q23 in 45% tumors. The patients with loss of 1q21.3 had shorter overall survival duration as compared to patients without loss of 1q21.3.