Health technology Two treatment options for patients with anthracycline-pretreated metastatic breast carcinoma were examined. The options were capecitabine (CAP) plus docetaxel (DOC) combination therapy and DOC alone. In the former (CAP+DOC), oral capecitabine (1,250 mg/m2 twice daily was given on days 1 14, followed by a 7-day rest period, with docetaxel (75 mg/m2) administered as a 1-hour int...

The recent paper by Haaber et al. (1) highlights another mechanism by which bacterial pathogens may evade the effects of antibiotics. The combination of colistin with vancomycin against Staphylococcus aureus may be antagonistic and may lessen the effectiveness of glycopeptide antibiotic. Colistin, it seems, induces gene expression in S. aureus which mimics the vancomycinintermediate (VISA) phen...

First I want to thank you for the privilege and honor of serving as your President during this past year. It has been a turbulent and an important year for cancer research and accelerated support is in process. I would like to take this opportunity to present some of the conceptual and practical advances that have been made in cancer chemotherapy in the past 15 to 20 years and to outline future...

Choroidal neovascularisation (CNV) often leads to severe vision loss and is becoming increasingly prevalent as the aging population grows. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause of CNV, but CNV also affects younger people with pathological myopia, ocular histoplasmosis syndrome, angioid streaks and idiopathic disorders. The monotherapies available worldwide to treat pat...

Combination therapy, a treatment modality that combines two or more therapeutic agents, is a cornerstone of cancer therapy. The amalgamation of anti-cancer drugs enhances efficacy compared to the mono-therapy approach because it targets key pathways in a characteristically synergistic or an additive manner. This approach potentially reduces drug resistance, while simultaneously providing therap...

Combination therapy of hypertension with separate agents or a fixed-dose combination pill offers the potential to lower blood pressure more quickly, obtain target blood pressure, and decrease adverse effects. Antihypertensive agents from different classes may offset adverse reactions from each other, such as a diuretic decreasing edema occurring secondary to treatment with a calcium channel blo...

Hepatitis B virus is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Effective therapies were first introduced in the mid-1980s but frequent and sometimes severe side effects limit their use. Combination therapy represents the future of treatment for chronic hepatitis B, probably consisting of two or more nucleoside analogues although interferon may form part of some combinations. New drugs...

Primary preventive measures for cardiovascular disease are centered on lifestyle changes such as diet, exercise, and weight management. If these lifestyle changes do not prove adequate in optimizing lipid levels, drug treatment should be considered. Four classes of lipid-lowering agents are presented briefly, including their respective lipoprotein effects, contraindications, and common adverse ...

The emergence of drug-resistant strains of HIV virus and treatment failure can result from non-adherence to antiretroviral therapy. While non-adherence to therapy is not a new issue or specific to HIV/AIDS, it has received renewed attention because of the complicated combination treatment regimens being prescribed. This paper reviews the relevant background literature on the contributions of so...

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF) is a major proinflammatory cytokine in the rheumatoid joint. TNF activity can be neutralized by administration of a recombinant version of its soluble p75 TNF receptor linked to the Fc portion of human immunoglobulin IgG1 (etanercept). The present study examined the combination of etanercept with methotrexate (MTX) in a group of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA...