Two patients manifested the typical clinical and pathological features of malignant histiocytosis. Objective remissions of 3 months and 2 months, respectively, were induced by combination chemotherapy with vincristine and prednisone. The patients eventually died from complications of this rapidly progressive and uniformly fatal illness without significant prolongation of survival time. Combined...

Approaches to improving the chemotherapy of Hodgkin's dis ease are presented and discussed: The dose-response (both antitumor effect and toxicity) curve for ohemotherapeutic agents is steep. Prior treatment and duration of disease have an adverse effect on response to chemotherapy. Continued treatment during remission (maintenance treatment) will prolong the duration of remission. Combined trea...

A 21-year-old woman with Cushing's syndrome presented with a mediastinal tumor. Ectopic ACTH syndrome was diagnosed and the tumor was resected. The histopathological diagnosis was thymic atypical carcinoid. Despite all tumor lesions having been resected, the tumor relapsed and multiple metastatic lesions grew aggressively. Combination chemotherapy with cisplatin and etoposide (VP16) was adminis...

The “state-of-art” treatment approach for patients with metastatic urothelial cancer (eg, bladder or other tumors of urinary tract) is platinum-containing chemotherapy, however, despite the high immediate efficacy therapy (up to 70% objective response rate), long-term results remain unsatisfactory, median progression-free and overall survival usually do not exceed 6 12 months respectively, visc...

Vidal et al. ( 1 ) reported on the use of rituximab maintenance for the treatment of follicular lymphoma. In contrast to their conclusions, we believe that there is insufficient evidence to routinely recommend maintenance rituximab following successful induction therapy in previously treated patients. In their meta-analysis, the authors pooled data from fi ve clinical trials of previously treat...

Although the graft-versus-leukemia effect of allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT) is of paramount importance in the maintenance of disease remission, the role played by the autologous T-cell response in antitumor immune surveillance is less defined. We evaluated the emergence of antileukemia cytotoxic T-lymphocyte precursors (CTLp's) and the correlation of this phenomenon with maintenan...

Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) affects patients of all ages, particularly adolescents and young adults between 16-34 years. Patients with HL who relapse following effective front-line therapy are offered salvage second-line chemotherapy regimens followed by high-dose therapy and autologous stem cell transplantation. The aim of this study is a report of a HL patient that treated with maintenance therapy ...

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is an important cause of morbidity and mortality in immunosuppressed patients. Though acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is an immunosuppressed state, CMV disease has been reported infrequently. We present a patient of adult B lineage ALL who was on maintenance chemotherapy and developed CMV pneumonia. Patient was managed with intravenous ganciclovir and had successful out...

Pemetrexed, a new multitarget antifolate antineoplastic agent, has significantly improved the overall survival in nonsquamous non-small-cell lung cancer patients. Presently, pemetrexed is recommended for first line treatment in combination with platinum derivatives, for second line treatment as a single agent and, more recently, as maintenance treatment after first line chemotherapy. In this ar...