Tumori
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Although hope is a widely used term, the experience of hope in patients with chronic or even life-threatening diseases is often disregarded due to the scarcity of carefully designed and validated assessment tools. The aim of this study was to validate the Hope Herth Index (HHI) questionnaire in the Italian population of patients with solid or hematological malignancies during active cancer treatment. ⋯ The Italian version of HHI is a valid and reliable assessment tool - useful to initiate conversation with someone who is troubled but finds it difficult to talk - in patients with either solid or hematological malignancies on active cancer treatment during the non-advanced stages of the disease.
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Sentinel lymph node biopsy is the standard method for axillary lymph node staging in patients with early stage breast cancer. The aim of the study was to evaluate the necessity of axillary lymph node dissection in patients with breast cancer and sentinel lymph node micrometastasis or isolated tumor cells. ⋯ Results suggest that micrometastasis or isolated tumor cells of the sentinel lymph node represent the only site of cancer involvement of the axilla, especially in patients with early breast tumors, and that axillary lymph node dissection may be unnecessary in these cases and represent an overtreatment.
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High-dose interferon-alpha remains the first-line treatment in the adjuvant therapy of metastatic melanoma. More recently, high-dose pegylated interferon-alpha-2b has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. Actually, an adjuvant therapy alternative to high-dose interferon-alpha is represented by ipilimumab. ⋯ Old tyrosine kinase inhibitors have been used in combination with interferon for the treatment of advanced melanoma patients with moderate benefits and increased toxicity, but new selective drugs seem to be more efficacious. Early metastatic melanoma patients (stage III-N1) should be the principal subset to be treated with the most suitable adjuvant therapy to achieve the best overall survival. New schedules have to be tested with high-dose interferon-alpha and ipilimumab alone or combined with tyrosine kinase inhibitors while waiting for results from ECOG 1609.
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The best treatment approach for solitary brain metastasis is not well defined and there is no consensus on this issue. It is still being debated whether patients with isolated brain metastasis should undergo surgical resection or stereotactic radiosurgery, and which patients should receive adjuvant whole brain radiotherapy. ⋯ To the best of our knowledge this is the first report on patients treated with linear accelerator-based stereotactic radiosurgery alone where an overall survival of more than 12 years was obtained, maintaining good quality of life in three cases of solitary brain metastasis from non-small cell lung cancer. In addition to the case reports, we present a brief literature review on this topic.
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Ewing tumor is the second most common bone tumor in children. Its variant, malignant small cell tumor of the thoracopulmonary region, is infrequent in children and extremely rare in adults. ⋯ We describe a rare case of primitive neuroectodermal tumor/Ewing sarcoma arising from the thoracic wall in a 54-year-old man. He underwent extensive resection of the tumor followed by adjuvant chemotherapy and radiotherapy.