PURPOSE We sought to determine whether dysregulation of the retinoblastoma (RB) tumor suppressor pathway was associated with improved response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN An RB-loss signature was used to analyze the association between pathway status and pathologic complete response in gene expression datasets encompassing three different neoadjuvant regi...

BACKGROUND Capecitabine has proven effective as a chemotherapy for metastatic breast cancer. Though several Phase II/III studies of capecitabine as neoadjuvant chemotherapy have been conducted, the results still remain inconsistent. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to obtain more precise understanding of the role of capecitabine in neoadjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer patients. M...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the expression of hypoxia-inducible factors (hypoxia-inducible factor 1A and hypoxia-inducible factor 2A) and aldehyde dehydrogenase proteins in patients with locally advanced breast carcinoma who were subjected to neoadjuvant chemotherapy. METHODS We included 90 patients with histologically confirmed stage II and III breast carcinoma who were treated with neoadjuvant che...

To investigate the outcomes of the selective neoadjuvant concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) in lower 3rd rectal cancer patients in different groups (with or without neoadjuvant CCRT), especially in survival rate, local recurrence rate, and sphincter preservation rate.From January 1999 to December 2012, 69 consecutive patients who had histologically proven adenocarcinoma of lower 3rd rectum, de...

The majority of patients with operable esophageal cancers present with locally advanced disease, for which surgical resection as a sole treatment modality has been historically associated with poor survival. Even following radical resection, most of these patients will eventually succumb to their disease due to distant metastasis. For this reason, there has been intense interest in the role of ...

to define efficacy of pre-operative chemotherapy in down staging of advanced non-round cell soft tissue sarcomas. from sep 2002 to dec 2005, 70 patients were treated by ifosfamid, mesna, cisplatin, adriamycin, mitomycin and subsequent surgery. postoperatively, patients received radiotherapy in cases of microscopically incomplete resection or local recurrence. the median age of the patients was ...

background: today the use of laparoscopy before laparotomy is an effective method for decision-making in patients with gastric adenocarcinoma. the reliance on ct scans for decision-making purposes is not only unhelpful, yet also misleading . nonetheless, indications for laparoscopy and its application are changing daily. the low quality of diagnostic tools and epidemiological situation in our c...

The optimal management of borderline resectable pancreatic cancer remains unclear. Neoadjuvant chemoradiation remains the most common approach in the United States, while neoadjuvant chemotherapy alone is also widely utilized and has demonstrated efficacy but there has been no clear consensus about a regimen that would be most beneficial in this setting. We will discuss three abstracts that wer...

Historically, neoadjuvant chemotherapy has been used to treat patients with advanced breast disease in an attempt to convert them into candidates for breast conservation surgery. The ultimate goal of histopathologic examination of the specimens removed after neoadjuvant chemotherapy is the identification of either residual disease or positive identification of the tumor bed. We report a series ...