Surgeons at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston have identified 87 genes that someday may tell doctors whether or not rectal cancer patients need surgery after chemotherapy and radiation.  The panel of genes predicted patients whose cancer appeared to be completely destroyed by the combination of chemotherapy and radiation before surgery, what is called pathological complete response.

Before it can become routine practice, the gene panel will need to be checked in another group of patients and clinical trials will need to be conducted to see if patients who have pathological complete responses and no surgery do as well as those who do have surgery. Read the rest of this entry »

The Food and Drug Administration warns health care facilities and people who use medical devices at home to check the power cords for wear and tear, especially if oxygen is being used nearby.

The FDA has more than 120 reports of sparking, charring, and fires from cords used by two device manufacturers, Hospira Inc. and Abbott Nutrition, and is concerned that there may be similar problems with cords on other devices.  Read the rest of this entry »

At the ECCO/ESMO  meeting in Berlin the data on a large phase III clinical trial from the United Kingdom (COIN) was presented. It was a trial comparing FOLFOX or XELOX in combination with Erbitux.

It is important to know that in the UK Avastin is not approved, and Erbitux was only recently approved in patients with organ limited disease based on the chance of curative resections in patients initially deemed not to be resectable. However it is difficult to judge what the COIN results mean. The response rates in the patients with wild-type KRAS was significantly increased to 64%, so far so good. The problem is that the time to tumor progression and overall survival was not improved in patients with wild-type KRAS and Erbitux therapies. Read the rest of this entry »

Briefly: The elderly are much more likely to have their colons perforated during colonoscopy, and inflammatory bowel disease patients who are part of a colonoscopy surveillance program before a diagnosis of colorectal cancer are diagnosed at an earlier stage and have much better survival than patients who don’t have colonoscopies before diagnosis.

There is help online for seniors and their caregivers who are having surgery and cancer survivors who are coping with “chemobrain”.  The FDA is cracking down on the unapproved marketing of some codeine drugs. Read the rest of this entry »

Using non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medicines (NSAIDS) before being diagnosed with colorectal cancer reduced women’s deaths both from any cause and from colorectal cancer five years later.

Women followed as part of the California Teachers Study who used NSAIDS regularly had more than 40 percent reduction in colorectal cancer deaths and a 30 percent  reduced chance of dying overall. Read the rest of this entry »