Senior peer counseling by telephone for psychosocial support after breast cancer surgery: effects at six months.

Purpose/objectives: To evaluate the efficacy of senior peer counseling by telephone for supplemental psychosocial support of older women after breast cancer surgery.

Design: Experimental, randomized block, longitudinal.

Setting: A community-based senior service agency and a community hospital-based breast surgical oncology practice in an urban area of California.

Prognostic relevance of occult nodal micrometastases and circulating tumor cells in colorectal cancer in a prospective multicenter trial.

Purpose: Nodal micrometastasis and circulating tumor cells detected by multimarker quantitative real-time reverse transcription-PCR (qRT-PCR) may have prognostic importance in patients with colorectal cancer.

Experimental Design: Paraffin-embedded sentinel lymph nodes from 67 patients and blood from 34 of these patients were evaluated in a prospective multicenter trial of sentinel lymph node mapping in colorectal cancer. Sentinel lymph nodes were examined by H&E staining and cytokeratin immunohistochemistry.