Building a statewide clinical trials network for cancer care in West Virginia.

In the United States, mortality rates have been declining for certain tumors, For the majority of advanced stage cancer types, cure is unattainable but treatment is still evolving. Advances in the treatment of cancer can be achieved by enrolling patients in cancer clinical trials. Presently, less than 3% of adult cancer patients participate on clinical trials in the United States.

Fatal acute tumor lysis syndrome with metastatic breast carcinoma.

A 53-year-old woman presented with an extensively metastatic and rapidly growing breast adenocarcinoma, markedly elevated lactate dehydrogenase, and mildly elevated blood urea nitrogen. She received 5-fluorouracil, doxorubicin, and cyclophosphamide. Eighteen hours after chemotherapy she was noted to have hyperuricemia, hyperkalemia, hyperphosphatemia, hypocalcemia, and acute renal failure.

Salvage chemotherapy of advanced lymphoma with investigational drugs: mitoguazone, gallium nitrate, and etoposide.

Patients with advanced lymphoma who relapse from intensive first-line combination chemotherapy generally have a very poor prognosis. The use of investigational drugs which lack cross-resistance to agents commonly used for initial therapy represents an important approach to the management of such patients. Based upon our prior experience, we developed a protocol which employed a combination of three new agents.

Cisplatin, vindesine, and mitoguazone in the treatment of esophageal cancer.

Forty-two patients with epidermoid carcinoma of the esophagus were treated with the three-drug combination of cisplatin, vindesine, and mitoguazone (DVM). Twenty patients had locoregional disease and 22 had extensive disease. Of 39 patients evaluable for response, 16 (41%) had complete or partial remission (95% confidence limits, 26%-56%).

Chemotherapy of metastatic sweat gland carcinoma. A retrospective review.

Sweat gland carcinoma (SGC) is a rare malignancy of the skin. though many patients with SGC die of disseminated metastases, little is known regarding the value of systemic chemotherapy for this disease. We reviewed the records of 20 patients with metastatic SGC who were treated with chemotherapy at Memorial Hospital between 1968 and 1983.