Successful reduction of alopecia induced by anthracycline and taxane containing adjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer - clinical evaluation of sensor-controlled scalp cooling.

Background: Scalp cooling is a long known method to reduce chemotherapy-induced alopecia in cancer patients with solid tumors. Due to a progress in this method, a medical device enabling individual feedback-controlled temperature regulation was evaluated. Between June 2011 and December 2012, 83 breast cancer patients were included.

One-step nucleic acid amplification-a molecular method for the detection of lymph node metastases in breast cancer patients; results of the German study group.

Sentinel lymph node (SN) biopsy is part of the staging procedure in breast cancer patients. In this study, we compared an intraoperative tool named one-step nucleic acid amplification (OSNA) to our routine histological investigation. OSNA consists of a short homogenization step followed by amplification of cytokeratin (CK) 19 mRNA directly from the lysate.