Bone metastases in patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma: are they always associated with poor prognosis?
Purpose: Aim of this study was to investigate for the presence of existing prognostic factors in patients with bone metastases (BMs) from RCC since bone represents an unfavorable site of metastasis for renal cell carcinoma (mRCC). Materials and methods: Data of patients with BMs from RCC were retrospectively collected. Age, sex, ECOG-Performance Status (PS), MSKCC group, tumor histology, presence of concomitant metastases to other sites, time from nephrectomy to bone metastases (TTBM, classified into three groups: <1 year, between 1 and 5 years and >5 years) and time from BMs to skeletal-related event (SRE) were included in the Cox analysis to investigate their prognostic relevance. R…
Modeling interactions between Human Equilibrative Nucleoside Transporter-1 and other factors involved in the response to gemcitabine treatment to predict clinical outcomes in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma patients.
Background Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is an extremely aggressive malignancy, characterized by largely unsatisfactory responses to the currently available therapeutic strategies. In this study we evaluated the expression of genes involved in gemcitabine uptake in a selected cohort of patients with PDAC, with well-defined clinical-pathological features. Methods mRNA levels of hENT1, CHOP, MRP1 and DCK were evaluated by means of qRT-PCR in matched pairs of tumor and adjacent normal tissue samples collected from PDAC patients treated with gemcitabine after surgical tumor resection. To detect possible interaction between gene expression levels and to identify subgroups of patients a…
NEW RESULTS ON NONMESONIC WEAK DECAY OF Lambda HYPERNUCLEI WITH FINUDA
The FINUDA experiment has performed a systematic study of the NonMesonic Weak Decay (NMWD) of Λ hypernuclei analizing all the data collected from 2003 up to 2007. The results of a measurement of the spectra of protons coming from the NMWD of [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are the subject of this paper.
Recent results on mesonic weak decay of Λ-hypernuclei
The FINUDA experiment has performed a systematic study of mesonic weak decay of p-shell Λ-hypernuclei. Recent results on the mesonic decay spectra and ratios are illustrated and discussed.
Natural history of malignant bone disease in renal cancer: final results of an Italian bone metastasis survey.
BackgroundBone metastasis represents an increasing clinical problem in advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) as disease-related survival improves. There are few data on the natural history of bone disease in RCC.Patients and methodsData on clinicopathology, survival, skeletal-related events (SREs), and bone-directed therapies for 398 deceased RCC patients (286 male, 112 female) with evidence of bone metastasis were statistically analyzed.ResultsMedian time to bone metastasis was 25 months for patients without bone metastasis at diagnosis. Median time to diagnosis of bone metastasis by MSKCC risk was 24 months for good, 5 months for intermediate, and 0 months for poor risk. Median number of SR…
How Have Intravitreal Anti-VEGF and Dexamethasone Implant Been Used in Italy? A Multiregional, Population-Based Study in the Years 2010–2016
Purpose. To describe intravitreal anti-VEGF drug and dexamethasone use in four Italian regions. Methods. Four regional claims databases were used to measure drug prevalence, compare dosing intervals to those recommended in the summary of product characteristics (SPC), and identify switchers. Bilateral treatment and diabetic macular edema (DME) coding algorithms were validated, linking claims with a sample of prospectively collected ophthalmological data. Results. Overall, 41,836 patients received ≥1 study drug in 2010–2016 (4.8 per 10,000 persons). In 2016, anti-VEGF drug use ranged from 0.8 (Basilicata) to 5.7 (Lombardy) per 10,000 persons while intravitreal dexamethasone use ranged from 0…
Metronomic chemotherapy (mCHT) in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) patients: results of the VICTOR-6 study
Abstract Purpose Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) represents a subtype of breast cancer which lacks the expression of oestrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR) and human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2): TNBC accounts for approximately 20% of newly diagnosed breast cancers and is associated with younger age at diagnosis, greater recurrence risk and shorter survival time. Therapeutic options are very scarce. Aim of the present analysis is to provide further insights into the clinical activity of metronomic chemotherapy (mCHT), in a real-life setting. Methods We used data included in the VICTOR-6 study for the present analysis. VICTOR-6 is an Italian multicentre retrosp…
COVID-19 Patient Management in Outpatient Setting: A Population-Based Study from Southern Italy
Evidence on treatments for early-stage COVID-19 in outpatient setting is sparse. We explored the pattern of use of drugs prescribed for COVID-19 outpatients’ management in Southern Italy in the period February 2020–January 2021. This population-based cohort study was conducted using COVID-19 surveillance registry from Caserta Local Health Unit, which was linked to claims databases from the same catchment area. The date of SARS-CoV-2 infection diagnosis was the index date (ID). We evaluated demographic and clinical characteristics of the study drug users and the pattern of use of drugs prescribed for outpatient COVID-19 management. Overall, 40,030 patients were included in the analyses, with…
Multidimensional Prognostic Index and pro-adrenomedullin plasma levels as mortality risk predictors in older patients hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia: a prospective study.
BACKGROUND: To evaluate the prognostic accuracy of proadrenomedullin (proADM) in comparison with and in addition to the Multidimensional Prognostic Index (MPI), a validated predictive tool for mortality derived from a comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) to predict one-month mortality risk in older patients hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). METHODS: All patients aged 65 years and older, consecutively admitted to an acute geriatric ward with a diagnosis of CAP from February to July 2012. At admission and at discharge they were submitted to a standard CGA in order to calculate MPI. Moreover, plasma samples were taken at baseline and after one, three and five days of ho…