Cancer

Node-negative, early stage breast cancer patients with high levels of DDX1 were found to have a significant improvement in local control, distant metastatic-free survival, and overall survival compared with patients with low levels of DDX1.

BRCA1-associated, hormone receptor (HRec)-negative metastatic breast cancer patients were less sensitive to taxane chemotherapy compared with sporadic HRec-negative patients. HRec-positive BRCA1- and BRCA2-associated patients had a similar sensitivity to taxane chemotherapy to sporadic patients.

Germline TP53 mutations lead to early onset breast cancer and are associated with Li-Fraumeni syndrome. There are limited data on the pathological characteristics of these cancers. In this article, we describe an association between breast cancer in patients with germline TP53 mutation and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 overexpression.

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is highly concordant with fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) in the assessment of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), but FISH better predicts prognosis of breast cancer patients. HER2 IHC-negative tumors showing luminal B subtype features of estrogen receptor-positive, grade II/III, and high Ki-67 proliferative index are highly associated with discordant FISH-positive result.

The authors studied the effects of zinc finger E-box binding factor 1 (ZEB1) on the latent-lytic switch of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection in gastric cancer and explored the importance of EBV in gastric carcinogenesis. The results indicated that ZEB1 is a key mediator of the latent-lytic switch of EBV-associated gastric cancer, a distinct subtype with different clinicopathologic features, and ZEB1 may be a potential target for EBV-associated gastric cancer therapy.

This is the first study to investigate the predictive role of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in circadian genes for colorectal cancer (CRC) prognosis. The authors demonstrated that 2 SNPs (rs3749474 and rs1801260) in the CLOCK gene were significantly associated with CRC overall survival.

Epigenetic silencing of the RNF180 gene, a novel tumor suppressor, by promoter methylation is a common event in gastric cancer and is associated with poor outcome in gastric cancer patients.

The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of the oxygen sensor prolyl hydroxylase-2 (PHD2) in pancreatic cancer growth and progression. The results indicated that pancreatic cancer cells bidirectionally use PHD2 signaling to regulate tumor aggressiveness, including invasiveness and metastasis.

The currently used criteria for selecting patients for active surveillance performed significantly better for patients aged <70 years. The authors believe that their current results should be taken into account when deciding whether to offer active surveillance to patients with low-risk prostate cancer.

Relapsed/refractory germ cell tumor patients have a poor prognosis and limited treatment options. The identification of novel active agents (especially cytostatic drugs) may be impaired by use of response as the primary endpoint in phase 2 trials. This retrospective study provides important data on the progression-free and overall survival of this patient population when treated with ineffective agents to guide design of future phase 2 and phase 3 studies.

Studies of surgical variation may identify processes of care that could affect the quality of surgical and postoperative care. The authors report that hospital-level variation confounds the inpatient care of patients with urologic cancer, most notably for length-of-stay outcomes after nephrectomy and prostatectomy.

This pooled analysis of small renal masses under active surveillance demonstrates the indolent biology and low metastatic potential of localized tumors during an initial course of observation.

Oxaliplatin combined with pemetrexed is well tolerated and has moderate activity as an induction regimen in head and neck cancer. This regimen should be considered as a backbone for the addition of targeted agents such as cetuximab, especially in a human papillomavirus-positive population.

The efficacy of azacitidine for the treatment of high-risk myelodysplastic syndromes prompted an investigation into its potential role in acute myeloid leukemia (AML); therefore, the authors of this report carried out a multicenter, retrospective analysis of 82 Italian patients with AML who received azacitidine. The current results indicated that azacitidine has promise as an effective therapy for elderly patients with untreated AML who have white blood cell counts <10 × 10⁹/L.

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cells with deletions of the short arm of chromosome 17p (del[17p]) typically have loss of functional p53, rendering them refractory to chemotherapeutic agents. In this report, the authors investigate the association of del(17p) with ABT-737 sensitivity in CLL cells, and the data indicate that p53 dysfunction may lead to decreased apoptosis induction by ABT-737.

The authors present the results of the first cost-effectiveness study to assess a strategy of epidermal growth factor receptor mutation testing and first-line treatment with gefitinib in the management of patients with advanced adenocarcinoma of the lung.

This is the largest single-institution series of patients with head and neck melanoma (n = 353) to date. The authors demonstrate sentinel lymph node biopsy to be reliable (99.7% identification rate), accurate (19.7% positive sentinel lymph node biopsy rate and 4.2% false-omission rate), and strongly prognostic of survival on multivariate analysis.

Stereotactic radiosurgery is frequently used to manage patients with residual or recurrent World Health Organization (WHO) grade II and III intracranial meningiomas. Tumors progressing despite prior external beam radiation therapy and larger tumor volume are negative predictors of tumor control and survival for patients having radiosurgery for WHO grade II and III intracranial meningiomas.

The aim of this study was to determine whether circulating C-reactive protein (CRP) levels before treatment predict the overall survival and disease-free survival in soft tissue sarcoma patients. Pretreatment elevated CRP levels were found to be a poor prognostic factor for overall survival in a univariate analysis, and a poor prognostic factor for disease-free survival in a multivariate analysis for soft tissue sarcoma patients.

Regardless of the 5-aminolevulinic acid (ALA) administration route, photodynamic diagnosis (PDD) mediated by ALA (ALA-PDD) is useful in detecting endoscopic invisible lesions such as dysplasia and carcinoma in situ, avoiding an incorrect decision on adjuvant therapy. In transurethral resection of bladder tumor, additional resection under ALA-PDD could avoid insufficient resection of tumors, reducing the rate of intravesical recurrence.

Significant demographic differences exist between healthy Caucasian and African American men who choose to participate in genomic research in terms of age, annual income, education level, and marital status. These differences may be important in future recruitment strategies for genomic research study.

Similar treatment leads to equivalent outcomes between African Americans and whites even in a relatively unselected predominantly community-based population. This suggests that differences in treatment received may be driving the disparities seen in population-based epidemiologic data.

The temporal prediction for US-level and state-level cancer mortality counts are evaluated and compared. The best method is recommended to produce the cancer mortality counts for the current calendar year published in Cancer Facts & Figures.

Spatiotemporal projection methods are evaluated and compared. The best method is recommended to produce the cancer incidence counts for the current calendar year published in Cancer Facts & Figures. See also pages 000-000

The data from the current study provide the first evidence that hdm2 mRNA is frequently mutated by alternative splicing in colorectal cancer, and may play a role in colorectal tumorigenesis or cancer progression.

The authors evaluated the cost-effectiveness of adding modern radiotherapy regimens to the treatment of locally advanced pancreatic cancer. Combining gemcitabine with stereotactic body radiotherapy increased the clinical effectiveness beyond that of gemcitabine alone at a cost potentially considered acceptable by today's standards.

Adolescents with rhabdomyosarcoma experienced less hematologic toxicity and greater peripheral nervous system toxicity compared with younger children. Females, regardless of age, experienced more hematologic toxicity than males. Future studies examining the age-related and sex-related differences in pharmacokinetics of chemotherapy are necessary.

This study compared neurosurgical resection followed by whole-brain irradiation (WBI) with WBI followed by radiosurgery (WBI + RS) in 152 patients with a single brain metastasis. The less invasive regimen of WBI + RS resulted in significantly better local control of the treated metastasis, whereas survival was not found to be significantly different in both groups.

A 2-fold affinity enhancement approach of using anti-epidermal growth factor receptor aptamers on nanotextured polymer substrates demonstrated greater efficiency in isolating tumor cells.