Chemotherapy, Radiation Therapy, and Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma—Reply

In Reply We appreciate the comments made by Lee et al and Bayatfard et al on our recent article. We applied concurrent cisplatin in the conventional 30-mg/m2 dose weekly when we designed this trial. This dose was routinely used in the treatment of head and neck neoplasms, including nasopharyngeal carcinoma. A secondary analysis of a prospective trial revealed that a cumulative cisplatin dose of 200 mg/m2 is sufficient for patients with locoregionally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma who undergo concurrent chemoradiotherapy. Prospective evidence on the optimal concurrent cisplatin dose after induction chemotherapy is lacking. Results from a large-sample retrospective study showed that cumulative cisplatin doses between 100 mg/m2 and 200 mg/m2 achieved satisfactory outcomes. In our study, the median cumulative cisplatin dose during radiation therapy was 180 mg/m2. Therefore, we consider that for patients with locoregionally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma who receive induction chemotherapy, the doses of concurrent cisplatin do not influence therapeutic effects.

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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