Financial Toxicity Among Patients With Advanced Solid Tumors Participating in Early-Phase Clinical Trials.

Purpose: Financial toxicity (FT) adversely influences patient quality of life and is a barrier to clinical trial enrollment. Early-phase clinical trials (EPCTs) recruit patients who may have high baseline FT and require additional visits and procedures, potentially increasing FT.

Methods: In this prospective survey study, we sought to assess FT at baseline and after 2 months among patients with advanced solid malignancies participating in EPCTs.

Carbamazepine treatment of myotonia congenita in a cat.

Case Summary: A 2-year-old female intact domestic shorthair cat was referred to the neurology service at the Foster Hospital for Small Animals as a result of lifelong weakness, seizure-like episodes after excitement, muscle spasms, stiffness of the limbs and shortness of breath. A diagnosis of myotonia congenita (MC) was made based on compatible history, clinical signs and electromyography findings, and excluding other causes of muscle weakness using muscle biopsy, baseline bloodwork and echocardiography. Initial treatment with procainamide had overall low efficacy.

Presumptive motor neuron degeneration in an adult cat.

An 8-year-old neutered male Bengal cat was referred because of a 1-year history of progressive and relapsing generalized muscle weakness and muscle atrophy. Before referral, the cat was treated with immunosuppressive doses of oral prednisolone, intermittently for 6 mo, and had responded well when the immunosuppressive dose was maintained. Generalized paresis, diffuse muscle atrophy, and diminished spinal reflexes were present in all limbs, consistent with a generalized lower motor neuron disease.

Pathologic Changes in and Immunophenotyping of Polymyositis in the Dutch Kooiker Dog.

Earlier, we described a breed-specific inflammatory myopathy in Dutch Kooiker dogs (Het Nederlandse Kooikerhondje), one of the nine Dutch breeds. The disease commonly manifests itself with clinical signs of difficulty walking, muscle weakness, exercise intolerance, and/or dysphagia. In nearly all dogs' creatine kinase (CK) activity was elevated.