Impact of comprehensive geriatric assessment on quality of life, overall survival, and unplanned admission in patients with non-small cell lung cancer treated with stereotactic body radiotherapy.

Objectives: Overall survival ﴾OS﴿ for patients with localized non-small cell lung cancer ﴾NSCLC﴿ treated with stereotactic body radiotherapy ﴾SBRT﴿ is poorer than for patients undergoing surgery. Patients who undergo SBRT are often ineligible for surgery due to significant comorbidities that can impact their mortality. A comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) that identifies and treats aging related comorbidities could improve OS and quality of life (QoL).

Aberrantly methylated DNA as a biomarker in breast cancer.

Aberrant DNA hypermethylation at gene promoters is a frequent event in human breast cancer. Recent genome-wide studies have identified hundreds of genes that exhibit differential methylation between breast cancer cells and normal breast tissue. Due to the tumor-specific nature of DNA hypermethylation events, their use as tumor biomarkers is usually not hampered by analytical signals from normal cells, which is a general problem for existing protein tumor markers used for clinical assessment of breast cancer.