European journal of cancer : official journal for European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) [and] European Association for Cancer Research (EACR)
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Comparative Study
Assessing health-related quality of life in palliative care: comparing patient and physician assessments.
It is often difficult to recruit patients for palliative care studies and severe attrition must be expected resulting in biased findings. This may be avoided if equivalent information could be obtained from sources other than the patients. Therefore, we investigated whether physician assessments can be used to evaluate the patients' health-related quality of life (HRQOL). ⋯ Physicians reported patients to have fewer problems/symptoms than patients did for all HRQOL domains except for physical and social functioning. The agreement between patients and physicians was poor. Using physician assessments may bias findings and cannot be recommended as a substitute for patient self-assessment in palliative care.
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In vitro and in vivo studies have demonstrated inhibition of glioblastoma growth by imatinib mesylate (Gleevec). Imatinib is an inhibitor of the tyrosine kinase activities of platelet-derived growth factor receptor (PDGF-r), which is involved in glioblastoma aggressiveness. ⋯ Furthermore, strong correlations between cellular 99mTc-(V)-DMSA uptake and the effect of imatinib therapy on U87-MG proliferation (r=0.896), invasion (r=0.621) and migration (r=0.822) were obtained, likewise for 99mTc-(V)-DMSA uptake and PDGF-r expression (r=0.958). Our results show that the biological effects of imatinib therapy on tumour cells properties are linked to PDGF-r phosphorylation and could be traced with 99mTc-(V)-DMSA, which also seems to be a potential tracer to evaluate the response to imatinib therapy in glioblastoma.