Independent News for the Oncologist and Hematologist/Oncologist CLINICALONCOLOGY.COM • January 2015 • Vol. 10, No. 1
SOLID TUMORS Report From SABCS: Nab-paclitaxel faces off against paclitaxel presurgery ................................
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Checkpoint inhibitors show promise for bladder and lung cancers ..................
15
CURRENT PRACTICE Patients battle financial toxicity of cancer treatment ..................................
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HEMATOLOGIC DISEASE Clinical Conundrums ...........................
see BRENTUXIMAB, B page 26
27
numbers
Cervical cancer survival by stage of disease, showing importance of early diagnosis.
16 Distant disease
57 Regional disease
91 Localized disease 20
40
60
80
5-year survival, % Source: American Cancer Society
Metastatic breast cancer in the lymph nodes; Massimo Cristofanilli, MD, describes how he manages metastatic breast cancer on page 8.
Vogl, NY on SOFT:
January is Cervical Cancer Awareness Month.
0
San Francisco—In high-risk Hodgkin lymphoma (HL), consolidation therapy after autologous hematopoietic cell transplant (auto-HCT) with the CD30directed monoclonal antibody brentuximab vedotin provides a major extension of progression-free survival (PFS), according to an interim analysis of the Phase III AETHERA trial. The benefit relative to placebo was consistent across subgroups. Emphasizing the significance of the data, principal investigator Craig H. Moskowitz, MD, noted that it has been 20 years since any new treatment for
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Phase III trial supports pomalidomide as standard of care for refractory MM ...
by the
IMAGES in ONCOLOGY
Brentuximab After Transplant May Be New Standard for HL
INSIDE
100
Debating Value of Ultrasound In Breast Cancer Screening
Ovarian Suppression Adds Little or Nothing To Tamoxifen
T
he key message from the SOFT report at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium and in The New England Journal of Medicine1 is negative— the study failed to dem- Steven Vogl, MD onstrate a significant benefit from adding ovarian function suppression (OFS) to tamoxifen (TAM) therapy for premenopausal women with resected breast cancer. This is a question that never had been properly asked before because earlier studies had not collected data on ovarian function at entry. As breast cancer physicians, we should be grateful for the see VOGL, NY, Y page 6
San Antonio—Results from a Connecticut study have some clinicians proclaiming that all women with dense breasts who have a negative mammogram should be offered an ultrasound. The study, presented at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS; abstract S5-01), found that ultrasound identified an additional 3.2 cancers per 1,000 women. “It is time to think of a new paradigm of utilizing screening ultrasound,” said the lead author of the study Jean Weigert, MD, a radiologist and the director of Breast Imaging at the Hospital of Central Connecticut, in New Britain. Since October 2009, Connecticut law has required clinicians to use certain language when providing mammographic results to women with dense breasts (approximately 40%-50% of women). Clinicians are required to say, “Your mammogram demonstrates that you have dense breast tissue, which could hide small abnormalities, and you might benefit from supplementary screening tests, which can include a breast ultrasound screening or a breast [magnetic resonance imaging] examination, or both, depending on your individual risk factors.” Connecticut is one of 19 states, to date, that mandate that clinicians include information on breast density when providing mammogram results to patients, according to Jafi Lipson, MD, an assistant professor of radiology at Stanford University Medical see ULTRASOUND, D page 12
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