Patients with cancers of the mid- and lower throat may have higher survival rates if their initial treatment includes surgery, according to new research presented to the 2015 European Cancer Congress.

Researchers told the Congress that a nationwide study in Taiwan found that, five years after diagnosis, radical surgery was associated with significant overall survival benefits among patients whose cancers of the throat had started to spread. However, fewer than half of the patients in the study received surgery.

Dr Chih-Tao Cheng, MD, a medical researcher at the Koo Foundation Sun Yat-Sen Cancer Center in Taipei City, Taiwan, said:

Caesarean delivery was not associated with decrease in the at-birth fracture rates in infants with osteogenesis imperfecta, a rare bone disorder, said a consortium of researchers led by Baylor College of Medicine.

The new research is the first study to come from the Brittle Bone Disorders Consortium, a new National Institutes of Health collaborative clinical research network focused on brittle bone disorders such as osteogenesis imperfecta.

Osteogenesis imperfecta is a connective tissue disorder that affects approximately 1 in 15,000 people. The major clinical feature of the disorder is increased fragility of bone, which leads to recurrent fractures and bone deformities. In the severe forms of the disorder, fractures occur in utero. With increased availability of prenatal ultrasound examination and genetic testing, many are diagnosed before birth.

 

Five billion people worldwide do not have access to safe and affordable surgery and anesthesia when they need it. As a consequence, millions of people are dying from common, easily treatable conditions like appendicitis, fractures, or obstructed labour. This is according to a major new Commission co-led by experts at King

Ji and colleagues used a microscopy technique called stimulated Raman scattering, or SRS, to image cancer cells in human brain tissue. SRS produces different signals for proteins and lipids, which can then be assigned a colour (blue and green, respectively), allowing the authors to differentiate brain cortex from tumour from white matter. Biopsies from adult and paediatric patients with glioblastoma revealed not only distinctive features with SRS microscopy but also the presence of infiltrating cells in tissues that appeared otherwise normal with traditional staining. Such infiltrating cells are important to catch early because leaving them behind after surgery nearly always leads to cancer recurrence. To make this SRS microscopy approach amenable to routine use in neuropathology, the authors also created an objective classifier that integrated different image characteristics, such as the protein/ lipid ratio, axonal density, and degree of cellularity, into one output, on a scale of 0 to 1, that would alert the pathologist to tumour infiltration. The classifier was built using more than 1400 images from patients with glioblastoma and epilepsy, and could distinguish between tumour-infiltrated and non-tumour regions with >99% accuracy, regardless of tumour grade or histologic subtype. This label-free imaging technology could therefore be used to complement existing neurosurgical workflows, allowing for rapid and objective characterization of brain tissues and, in turn, clinical decision-making.

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