Articles

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. And now it seems that 4 cups of coffee a day may reduce recurrence and death in patients with stage III colon cancer after surgical resection and adjuvant chemotherapy, according to a study led by Brendan J. Guercio, MD, Harvard Medical School, Boston.

Barcelona, Spain—Controlling and minimizing nausea and vomiting enables patients with cancer to continue their chemotherapy. A clinical trial reported at the 2015 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer shows that the newly approved agent aprepitant (Emend), an oral neurokinin (NK)₁ antagonist, improved antiemetic control in patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) who were receiving oxaliplatin-based chemotherapy, according to Junichi Nishimura, MD, Assistant Professor, Osaka University, Japan.

Barcelona, Spain—The first randomized study prospectively investigating the efficacy of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) added to standard systemic treatment in patients with unresectable colo­rectal cancer (CRC) liver metastases revealed progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) benefits, according to Theo J.M. Ruers, MD, PhD, Department of Surgery, The Netherlands Cancer Institute-Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Ziekenhuis, Amsterdam.

Barcelona, Spain—In the REACH trial evaluating ramucirumab (Cyramza) as second-line treatment in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma after first-line therapy with sorafenib (Nexavar), overall survival (OS) was improved in the subgroup population with baseline α-fetoprotein of ?400 ng/mL (Child-Pugh class A). The OS benefits in the overall population (Child-Pugh classes A and B) did not reach significance, said lead investigator Andrew X. Zhu, MD, PhD, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Boston.

A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention documented an average 38% colorectal cancer (CRC) screening rate among people aged 40 to 49 years, and a 69.7% rate in those aged ?50 years with a first-degree relative with CRC. An earlier analysis of National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data from 2005 and 2010 showed that first-degree relatives of patients with CRC were 70% more likely to have a colonoscopy than their counterparts.

San Francisco, CA—Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) screening of women who are at average risk for breast cancer had a mean additional cancer diagnosis yield of 15.8 per 1000 patients, surpassing the yields for digital breast tomosynthesis and ultrasound in a new study. The results were presented at the 2015 Breast Cancer Symposium, by Christiane K. Kuhl, MD, Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, RWTH Aachen University, Germany. This suggests that breast MRI screening alone every 3 years may be sufficient for women at average risk.

Vienna, Austria—Patients with advanced, pretreated renal-cell carcinoma (RCC) who have limited treatment options got good news from 2 important practice-changing trials, CheckMate 025 and METEOR, which were presented as late-breaking abstracts at the 2015 European Cancer Congress (ECC). CheckMate 025 showed a survival benefit for nivolumab (Opdivo) over standard therapy with everolimus (Afinitor) in patients with previously treated advanced RCC. This is the first trial to show a survival benefit for an immune checkpoint inhibitor after standard therapy has failed. METEOR showed that cabozantinib (Cometriq) nearly doubled progression-free survival (PFS) compared with standard everolimus in patients with advanced RCC whose disease progressed with previous vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) receptor (VEGFR)-targeted therapy.

In October, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) released its first set of “flash cards” or “Evidence Blocks” as a tool for evaluating treatment decisions, seeking to solve a drug cost problem that does not exist, by adding to a problem that does: insurers shifting the cost of cancer treatment to patients. In so doing, the NCCN could inadvertently increase the rate at which patients with cancer choose assisted suicide.

To take full benefit of advances made possible by Next-Generation Sequencing, more American patients with cancer must be involved in clinical trials, said Raju Kucherlapati, PhD, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care.