What ever happened to...? Looking back 10 years.
نویسنده
چکیده
This is part of an occasional series that recalls some of the stories reported 10 years ago in the News section of the Journal. This September, results of a phase III study of the shark cartilage extract AE-941 (Neovastat) suggested no benefit of the product on overall survival of patients with renal cell cancer. The findings come as a disappointment to researchers in a field plagued by negative publicity. Shark cartilage gained widespread attention in 1993 when the television news program " 60 Minutes " broadcast a story on shark cartilage as a promising treatment for cancer. The centerpiece was a Cuban study that reported that 3 of 29 patients with cancer responded to shark cartilage treatments. In the Aug. 4, 1993 issue of the Journal, the News spoke with experts who dismissed the findings as unreliable and criticized " 60 Minutes " for sensationalizing the treatment. In fact, subsequent studies have found no benefit of shark cartilage for the treatment of cancer. In a 1998 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers reported that shark cartilage was no more effective than supportive care in 60 patients with various advanced cancers, including breast, colorectal, lung, prostate, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Moreover, the treatment had no noticeable effects on quality of life. And in 2000, Danish researchers reported at the European Breast Cancer Conference that shark cartilage was ineffective in women with advanced breast cancer. Still, there was a concern that shark cartilage products were being used outside of the clinical trial setting by patients with cancer. In 2000, the National Cancer Institute launched a randomized phase III trial to test the effects of AE-941—a pharmaceutical agent that has demonstrated antiangiogenic activity in preclinical studies—in combination with chemotherapy and radiotherapy in 756 patients with unresectable non–small-cell lung cancer. " This is the first time in which a shark cartilage product has been looked at in a randomized controlled trial for cancer, " said Jeffrey White, M.D., director of the Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Cancer Institute. He added that he hopes the findings will provide a clearer assessment of shark cartilage's clinical value. principal investigator of the trial, said that some researchers are skeptical of AE-941 because it is a standardized extract rather than a purified molecule. He said that accrual to the trial has been slow and part of the challenge has been overcoming physicians' …
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عنوان ژورنال:
- Journal of the National Cancer Institute
دوره 93 14 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1999