EUROPEAN ONCOLOGY & HAEMATOLOGY – VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 – SUMMER 2014

Nausea and vomiting remains one of the major side effects associated with anticancer chemotherapy. It is one of the main reasons for poor compliance with cancer treatment. Advances in the understanding of the pathophysiology of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting (CINV) and the identification of major risk factors have greatly contributed towards the prophylaxis of CINV. […]

Clinical trials have long been dominated by clinically based endpoints such as overall survival (OS) and Progression-free survival (PFS) to measure the effectiveness of a treatment. A five-year OS rate, for example, indicates the percentage of patients alive after five years of treatment or five years after they were diagnosed. PFS indicates the length of […]

Pain is a common feature of cancer that presents a significant clinical challenge. The prevalence of pain increases as the condition progresses¹ and it affects over 80 % of patients with advanced disease.² Opioids remain the best front-line treatment for providing pain relief (PR), but even when these agents effectively control background pain, patients often […]

In patients with locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC), not involving the mesorectal fascia (MRF), surgery with total mesorectal excision (TME) is the standard of care. Prior to the TME era, high rates of local recurrence (LR) were observed after radical surgery, and 10–40 % of patients required a permanent stoma, even for tumours arising in […]

A young patient was diagnosed with two synchronous colon cancers and found to be a MLH1 carrier diagnosing him with hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC or Lynch syndrome). Our patient suffered a cardiac arrest while on chemotherapy (capecitabine) and following cardiac investigations was found to have a long QT syndrome (LQTS) as well. There is […]

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cancer-related mortalities reach 7.9 million worldwide each year.¹ Among women, breast cancer is one of the most common cancers globally. Despite advances in early detection and understanding on the molecular pathogenesis of breast cancer, approximately 30 % of patients with early-stage breast cancer experience recurrent disease.² Systemic treatment […]

The treatment of triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an unmet medical need, which refers to tumors that are estrogen receptor (ER) and progesterone receptor (PR) negative, and where human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) is not overexpressed. This subset accounts for approximately 12–20 % of breast cancer patients.¹ Gene expression analysis on this […]

Over the last two decades, the field of oncoplastic surgery (OPS) has been established and continually refined, representing a major advance in breast cancer surgery. After establishing the safety of breast-conserving treatment (BCT) in the 1980s, there has been an increasing demand on the part of both patients and surgeons for better aesthetic outcomes and […]

Case Presentation A 64-year-old male presented with a 1-month history of progressively worsening headaches. He had no other central neurological symptoms, including ocular symptoms, and examination of the central and peripheral nervous system was normal. Physical examination did not reveal lymphadenopathy or organomegaly and was normal for all systems examined. No constitutional symptoms such as […]

Prostate cancer is the most common malignancy in males in the US and Europe: approximately 15.3 % of men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point during their lifetime.¹ The majority of patients are diagnosed at an early stage, at which treatments such as radiotherapy or surgery may be curative.² The first-line treatment […]

Malignant melanoma is an aggressive form of skin cancer and has demonstrated an increasing mortality among men in the last quarter century.¹ The 5-year survival rate is approximately 15–20 % for stage IV melanoma.² Surgical management of primary melanoma remains wide excision with or without the addition of sentinel lymph node biopsy. While 5-year survival […]