INTRODUCTION A prospective randomised study involving 810 elderly patients was conducted in an attempt to compare alternating chemotherapy with conventional first-line chemotherapy in aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in order to improve prognosis with an acceptable toxicity for elderly patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients included were 55-69 years old and had at least one adverse prognost...

BACKGROUND We evaluated the efficacy and safety of single-dose fosaprepitant in combination with intravenous granisetron and dexamethasone. PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients receiving chemotherapy including cisplatin (≥70 mg/m(2)) were eligible. A total of 347 patients (21% had received cisplatin with vomiting) were enrolled in this trial to receive the fosaprepitant regimen (fosaprepitant 150 mg...

Primary systemic therapy (PST) or neoadjuvant therapy is used in nonmetastatic breast cancer to treat systemic disease earlier, decrease tumor bulk ideally to a complete pathological response (pCR), and reduce the extent of surgery. The multitude of clinical trials using PST in breast cancer patients has not proven the fundamental hypotheses of improved overall survival and disease-free surviva...

BACKGROUND For patients with anthracycline-resistant metastatic angiosarcoma, there is currently no available standard for second-line therapy, and a need exists for novel effective regimens to improve response rates. CASE REPORT We report here on a case of a primary angiosarcoma of both breasts in a 34-year-old woman presenting with lung metastases. Upon completion of 3 cycles of the MAID re...

AIM To analyze the results of chemotherapy applied at the Bülent Ecevit University School of Medicine, Department of Medical Oncology, to elderly patients with metastatic gastric cancer (GC). METHODS The study retrospectively investigated hospital records including pathological reports, imaging records, chemotherapy regimens, response and toxicity profile. All patients received systemic chemo...

BACKGROUND We assessed the efficacy and toxicity of ifosfamide and doxorubicin combination chemotherapy (CT) regimen retrospectively in Turkish patients with recurrent or metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) previously treated with platinum-based chemotherapy. METHODS A total of thirty patients who had received cisplatin based chemotherapy/chemoradiotherapy as a primary treatment receive...

Patients with inoperable gastric cancer may benefit from palliative chemotherapy. However, to date, there is no generally accepted standard regimen. Single chemotherapy drugs, e.g. cisplatin, 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), and doxorubicin, have long been considered as active drugs (Ajani et al., 2005), and more recently agents such as docetaxel, paclitaxel, irinotecan and oxaliplatin have been added to...

Early assessment of disease response to induction chemotherapy is important in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in order to plan future therapy and identify chemorefractory disease. Such assessment is customarily performed by examining the bone marrow at around day 14 after initiation of chemotherapy. However, criteria for assessment of residual leukemia in day 14 bone marrow specimens as well as t...

BACKGROUND Extensive studies have confirmed the efficacy of taxanes in combination with anthracycline-based chemotherapy on breast cancer. However, few studies have assessed the efficacy of weekly taxane-anthracycline regimens on locally advanced breast cancer. This study was to compare the efficacy and safety of a weekly taxane-anthracycline regimen with those of tri-weekly anthracycline-based...