PURPOSE ERα and PR levels are critical determinants for breast cancer prognosis and response to endocrine therapy. Although PR is known to be silenced by methylation of its promoter, few studies have correlated methylation with PR levels and outcome in breast cancer. There is only one previous small study comparing methylation of the two PR isoforms, PRA and PRB, which are expressed from differ...

BACKGROUND Oncologists are at high risk of poor mental health. Prior research has focused on burnout, and has identified heavy workload as a key predictor. Compassion fatigue among physicians has generally received less attention, although medical specialties such as oncology may be especially at risk of compassion fatigue. We contribute to research by identifying predictors of both burnout and...

BACKGROUND The impact of adjuvant chemotherapy on breast cancer prognosis has been demonstrated in randomized trials, but its impact is unknown in real-world populations. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of adjuvant chemotherapy on the survival of breast cancer patients in an unselected population. METHODS This prospective cohort study included 32,502 women treated at the Inst...

April 15, 2010 Traditionally host factors such as weight and physical activity have not been considered in the overall treatment of breast cancer patients. In this issue of ONCOLOGY, Nagaiah and Abraham review the epidemiologic and biologic evidence evaluating the relationships among obesity, physical activity, and both breast cancer recurrence and mortality, and in doing so, advocate weight ma...

The present study aims to investigate the relationship of NF-κB p65 and PTEN protein with chemotherapy resistance in ovarian cancer by measuring their expression in primary epithelial ovarian cancer, and to explore the correlation of the expression of these two proteins with ovarian carcinoma and their clinical significance. Ovarian cancer patients (n = 161) were divided into two groups: sensit...

PURPOSE The reliability of microarray-based cancer prognosis is questioned by Michiels et al. They reanalyzed seven studies published in the prominent journals as successful stories of microarray-based cancer prognosis and concluded that the originally reported assessments are over optimistic. We set to investigate the reality of microarrays for predicting cancer prognosis by using the same dat...

DietCompLyf is a multi-centre prospective study designed to investigate associations between phytoestrogens - naturally occurring plant compounds with oestrogenic properties - and other diet and lifestyle factors with breast cancer recurrence and survival. 3159 women with grades I-III breast cancer were recruited 9-15 months post-diagnosis from 56 UK hospitals. Detailed information on clinico-p...

See Articles page 488 The promise of microarrays has been of apocalyptic dimensions. As put forth by one of their inventors, " all human illness can be studied by microarray analysis, and the ultimate goal of this work is to develop effective treatments or cures for every human disease by 2050 ". 1 All diseases are to be redefined, all human suffering reduced to gene-expression profiles. Cancer...

The polymorphism rs2853669 within the promoter of telomerase reverse transcriptase gene (TERTp) has been debated about its role in cancer risk and prognosis. Additionally, several studies report inconsistent results concerning the modifying effect of rs2853669 on the prognostic value of TERTp mutations in cancer patients. Here, we performed this meta-analysis to comprehensively evaluate the rol...

The miR-200 family has emerged recently as a noticeable marker for predicting cancer prognosis and tumor progression. We aimed to review the evidence of miR-200c-141 genomic cluster as prognostic biomarkers in cancers. The results suggested that high level of miR-200c had no significant impact on OS (HR = 1.14 [0.77-1.69], P = 0.501) and DFS/PFS (HR = 0.72 [0.45-1.14], P = 0.161). Stratified an...