Latest Conference Articles

In patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the oral multikinase inhibitor regorafenib (BAY 73-4506) produced disease regression or stabilization in 81% of patients in a phase II study presented at the ECCO 15 - ESMO 34 Joint Congress.

According to the results of two studies presented at the ECCO 15 – ESMO 34 Joint Congress in Berlin, Germany, two new blood tests may eventually help clinicians screen for and diagnose gastrointestinal and colorectal cancers earlier.

Jetske Ruiterkamp, surgical resident, Jeroen Bosch Hospital, of The Netherlands and colleagues presented findings from a retrospective study that compared the rate of 5-year overall survival and reduction in the risk of death in women with stage IV breast cancer who underwent resection of their tumor compared with those who did not.

In men deemed at high risk for developing prostate cancer, the dual 5α-reductase inhibitor dutasteride reduced the risk of biopsy-detectable prostate cancer across multiple subgroups by 16% to 32%, according to a subgroup analysis of the REDUCE trial (Reduction by DUtasteride of prostate Cancer Events) presented at the ECCO 15 - ESMO 34 Joint Congress.

In a Scientific Symposium at ECCO/ESMO, researchers from the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Department of Molecular Carcinogenesis; Academic Medical Center, Department of Pathology; and MD Anderson Cancer Center, Department of Systems Biology, discussed the PI3K pathway as a factor in poor response or resistance to HER2-inhibitors such as trastuzumab (Herceptin).

Gefitinib, an oral tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI), is highly effective in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who harbor mutations of the EGFR gene (mEGFR), as demonstrated by a pooled analysis of four phase III studies and a separate phase III study presented at the ECCO 15 – ESMO 34 Joint Congress.

The ECCO 15 - ESMO 34 Multidisciplinary Congress opened on Sunday, September 20, 2009, at the Internationales Congress Centrum (ICC) Berlin.

Is there a difference between autobiographical memory and episodic memory? Are they identical, as some researchers have treated them, or is autobiographical memory “a superordinate system with episodic memory as a subsystem.”

Insulin resistance is a well-known underlying mechanism in such metabolic disorders as diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and dyslipidemia, all of which increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

A poster by Daniel L. Murman, MD, University of Nebraska Medical Center, and colleagues asks a key question in this era of managed care, tightening healthcare budgets, and possible comprehensive healthcare reform: could a tool that measures the level of care needed by patients with Alzheimer’s disease be used to help evaluate the cost effectiveness of AD treatments and therapies?

The presenter discusses objective, design, and results of this study, which was undertaken to examine the long-term effect of combined pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic interventions in geriatric patients with depression, mixed dementia, and cardiovascular comorbidities.

Today’s featured resource is the Internet-based Forecasting of the Burden of Alzheimer’s Disease (iFBAD) website developed by Ron Brookmeyer, PhD, Elizabeth Colantuoni, PhD, and colleagues in the Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Kara M. Erwin discusses the challenges faced by Alzheimer’s disease researchers seeking to find brain donors.

The theme for the Tuesday session was “Alzheimer's disease Biomarkers: Update from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative.”

Rodrigo O. Kuljis discusses the challenges to our understanding of neurodegenerative disorders and to the development of effective treatments and prevention presented because we lack a “satisfactory, unanimously agreed and unifying conceptual scheme” for them.

The number of people with Alzheimer's and dementia – both new cases and total numbers with the disease – continues to rise among the very oldest segments of the population in contradiction of the conventional wisdom.

Each morning at the 2009 ICAD conference, there is a media session featuring researchers who will be speaking or presenting that day. The session is recorded and posted online as brief videos. The theme for the Monday session was “Risk Factors for Alzheimer's; Update on Alzheimer's Prevalence/Incidence.”

MDNG is always on the lookout for new online resources for physicians and patients that promotes more effective communication, enhances the physician patient relationship, and helps patients and caregivers take a more active role in treatment.

Data presented at the 2009 International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease in show that combination therapy with the investigational drug dimebon (latrepiridine) and donepezil HCl tablets was well tolerated in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease.

Wellstat Therapeutics has developed vistonuridine, the first viable prodrug of uridine, which is an orally administered agent that delivers approximately 8-fold more uridine as it is converted to uridine in the body than administration of uridine itself.

Early chemotherapy for relapsed ovarian cancer based on serial monitoring of CA-125 levels failed to improve overall survival or quality of life compared with delayed therapy according to clinical signs and symptoms of relapse in a large European trial.

Researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, PA, believe the experimental drug neratinib may offer a new treatment option for women with HER2-positive breast cancer.

In what researchers from the University Hospital in Madrid, Spain, are calling a practice-changing study, sequential treatment with chemotherapy followed by chemoradiotherapy more than doubled time-to-treatment failure in patients with unresectable locally advanced head and neck cancer.

Dr. Hussein Tawbi and colleagues decided to look for biomarkers that might predict response to alkylator-based chemotherapy used to treat metastatic melanoma. They identified eight genes that they believe may form a profile useful in distinguishing responders from nonresponders.

A new retrospective study shows that use of three widely prescribed selective serotinin reuptake inhibitors—Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft—more than double the risk of breast cancer recurrence in women treated with tamoxifen.