Chemotherapy, Radiation Therapy, and Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

To the Editor We read the article by Dai et al with great interest. Omitting chemotherapy in patients receiving induction chemotherapy (IC) is a hot topic in nasopharyngeal carcinoma treatment, particularly in the intensity-modulated radiotherapy era. Yet, concurrent cisplatin is still recommended in advanced-stage disease, and the cumulative dose of concurrent cisplatin recommended is at least 200 mg/m2 in the latest American Society of Clinical Oncology/Chinese Society of Clinical Oncology guidelines. The authors in the current study gave 30-mg/m2 cisplatin per week and only 12.1% of patients had received 7 weeks of cisplatin, which makes a total 210 mg/m2. For patients receiving IC, at least a total 160-mg/m2 dose of cisplatin is recommended, which had been received by 85.8% of patients. Could the inadequate cumulative concurrent cisplatin dose be the reason why the IC in combination with radiotherapy (IC-RT) arm was noninferior to the IC with induction chemotherapy combined with chemoradiotherapy (IC-CCRT) arm? Therefore, we would kindly like the authors to separately analyze the results of patients receiving adequate doses of concurrent cisplatin.

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Settembre 2024

Chemotherapy, Radiation Therapy, and Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

To the Editor A recent randomized clinical trial reported that after induction chemotherapy (IC), patients with stages III to IVB (American Joint Committee on Cancer Staging Manual, 7th Edition) nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) receiving radiation therapy alone had noninferior oncologic outcomes and fewer acute adverse events, compared with those receiving concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT). We have several comments about this impactful study.

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Settembre 2024

Advancing Research in Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) is the second most common type of skin cancer and, according to recent data from Europe, has possibly overtaken melanoma as the leading cause of skin cancer–related death. Accurate data from the US remain elusive, limiting the ability to conduct large-scale analyses of cSCC. Much of the issue lies in assembling a complete clinical record for individual patients and in processing text from notes and pathology reports into a usable format. The ability of large language models to do these tasks holds great promise to capture more of the patient record in the near future and provide highly granular data. Even once there is better integration of these tools, new approaches to provide high-quality data are necessary as it is painfully evident that methods relying on International Classification of Disease codes alone are poor at identifying distinct skin cancers, let alone differentiating basal cell carcinoma from cSCC.

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Settembre 2024